


infinity, the galaxy in me

by Sorrel



Category: Mass Effect Trilogy
Genre: Earthborn (Mass Effect), F/M, Mass Effect 2, Purple Shepard, WIP Amnesty, slight canon AU
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-01-03
Updated: 2018-01-02
Packaged: 2019-02-27 08:59:44
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 32,048
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13244898
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sorrel/pseuds/Sorrel
Summary: In a universe just one door over, Commander Shepard meetsSpectreGarrus Vakarian in her relentless pursuit of Saren Arterius, and form a legendary partnership that saves the galaxy from extinction.  Two years later, she’s back from the dead and ready to pick up where they left off - but things aren't so simple this time around, and friendship has a way of getting tangled in old sorrows and even older dreams.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Please note that this is being posted under WIP amnesty, which is to say: this is basically an abandoned work, and there very probably isn't going to be any more of it. I dithered over posting it at all, but ultimately I do have a pretty solid chunk done, so it might as well go up here instead of just gathering dust on my hard drive.
> 
> The title is from Grafton Primary's "Relativity."

The Illusive Man sits, and he smokes, and he considers the problem of Shepard.

It’s hard to think about anything _but_ Shepard, today: the vidscreen behind him drones on, as it has for the last six hours, with the announcement. The unveiling of a memorial to the first human Spectre on Terra Nova has been broadcasting across every screen in Council space; first by the Alliance, and then with asari and turian and salarian news stations not far behind, competing to see who can make the announcement about them the fastest. Just as they’ve been doing for the last eight months, with increasing lack of subtlety. With the woman herself gone, it’s so much easier to sweep human contributions to the continued existence of galactic civilization under the rug.

Sickening.

Still, they might yet make use of the fervor, in ways the the Council could not have anticipated. The Illusive Man returns his attention to Operative Lawson’s report, the latest in a series hallmarked by increasingly urgent subject lines and ever-greater amounts of thinly-veiled condescension. She thinks he’s making the wrong choice, refusing to implant a control chip into Shepard. He has to consider that she might be correct, and they’re running out of time to make the final decision. The structural repairs are almost complete, and if the chip is to be implanted, it must be done soon.

Miranda says it’s too great a risk to leave Shepard uncontrolled, free of their influence except by the usual means. And in a sense, she’s entirely correct. Shepard is famously intractable, obstinate enough to make a turian proud once she’s made up her mind about something. As well, her interference with their operations in the previous year is unfortunate, as she’ll be predisposed to dislike and distrust their organization on principle. Without a secondary means of control, there is a very real chance that they might lose her, and with her all of their considerable investment of time and resources. More importantly, they might lose the best chance they have to make a decisive strike against the Reapers and secure humanity’s ascendance on a galactic scale.

But.

He thumbs past Miranda’s report to Operative Rasa’s profile, compiled shortly after Saren’s downfall at the Citadel. No family on record, raised in a public care facility until she ran away after displaying biotic powers at the age of eleven. Two arrests on record in adolescence, one for vandalism and one for assault with a deadly weapon, dropped for lack of evidence. Joined the Alliance Navy on her eighteenth birthday, and to all appearances never looked back, returning to Earth only to complete the ICD training program.

A strong woman, capable of standing on her own but paradoxically driven to seek out emotional connections that were lacking in her youth. A good soldier, one of the fraction of a percent to earn the N7 designation, but possessing of a fundamental distrust of authority that even years of Alliance service never quite scrubbed away. A talented biotic, one of the first adults to receive the modified L3 implant, with mental focus strong enough to make her the equal of some of the more functional L2 trainees. A woman of both iron will and ethical flexibility, needed to survive six years of classified assignments in the Terminus systems, but also enough morality to throw in with the defense at Elysium, despite orders to withdraw to a more tactically advantageous position. It won her the Star of Terra, but also ended a promising career as an undercover operative. After some internal shuffling, she was given a final promotion to the rank of Commander, and the dubious honor of Captain Anderson's executive officer, on a showboat political project that was intended to go nowhere. Where, instead, she went on to save the galaxy.

A complicated woman, the Illusive Man thinks. But there is one simple truth, underriding every line of the report even if Miranda herself can't see it: if they try to put some form of restraint on Shepard, she will set her entire considerable effort of will towards destroying it, and them along with it. He’s fairly certain she would fail, in the end - however powerful, she _is_ just one woman - but so, too, would their plan. He has not spent this much time, effort, and money just to have to put her down like a rabid dog, especially not due to a situation of his own making.

No, they will have to employ more mundane methods of persuasion for their Commander Shepard. They will have to build her a mission she can’t refuse, give her a ship and a crew that she’ll be willing to call her own in spite of her distrust of the source. Those are done easily enough; it’s just a matter of credits and intelligence, and he has more than plenty of both. That will be enough to secure at least her nominal cooperation, he’s sure. But in the longer term…

There are no romantic attachments on record for Shepard, at least as far as his best investigators could determine. Her sexual liaisons have been numerous and varied, but no lasting connections were ever formed, to members of her own race or otherwise. There were rumors of involvement with Lieutenant Alenko or Dr. T’Soni, but further investigation after Saren’s defeat proved that they were just that, rumor. Romantic connections aside, however, Shepard has proven time and again that she is no more immune to emotional attachment than any other sentient species. She has gone further and done more for the sake of her crew than can be explained away by happenstance or a generous nature, and was rewarded by their equally ferocious loyalty in turn. He may not approve of her _choice_ of attachments, but the fact remains that there is an angle that they can exploit, potentially even to bind her further to their cause.

Most of her former ground squad are definitively out of his reach, at least for the time being. Alenko is firmly within the grasp of the Alliance and not likely to be removed any time soon, and Urdnot Wrex would be unwilling to leave Tuchanka after his recommitment to his people, even for loyalty to a trusted comrade. Dr. T’Soni has proven willing to work with them before, for Shepard’s sake, but she’s much too useful where she is to be wasted on a combat position. Tali’Zorah has potential, but will have to be timed correctly. The turian, however…

There are some in Cerberus who view Garrus Vakarian as a weakness, an unnecessary complication to the heroic narrative of the first human Spectre who saved the galaxy from extinction. Even now, naysayers among the Council races will occasionally make a sly attempt to insinuate that the true hero of the hour was in fact Vakarian, with Shepard as little more than a cat’s-paw for Alliance media to bandy about. So far the Council has resisted these attempts, but it’s only a matter of time until public pressure swings far enough to make them bow. Vakarian is a weakness their cause cannot afford.

But it also cannot be denied that Shepard accomplished some of the most spectacular work of her already impressive career with her fellow Spectre by her side. They demonstrated complementary combat capabilities and a strong working partnership, and if Vakarian had any resentment about being under the command of his nominal equal, he displayed no signs of it that any agent has been able to discern. He was a decorated soldier in his first term of service, an accomplished security officer on the Citadel before his recruitment into Special Tactics and Recon, and a sniper of unparalleled skill who completed a surprising number of fugitive retrieval missions, considering the short number of years between his recruitment and his assignment on the _Normandy._ Vakarian is a talented and dedicated agent… and one with little loyalty left to his employers, as he is, right now, currently on a ship heading away from Citadel space, unlikely to return of his own volition.

Yes, the Illusive Man thinks, stubbing out his cigarette. Garrus Vakarian might be exactly who they need. Isolated, estranged from his family, no lasting friendships of any depth from previous service, no strong emotional bonds to anyone but Shepard… He could hate everything that Cerberus stands for, but he’ll join anyway, just to follow her. And Shepard will be less inclined to rebel for the sake of it, with a trusted ally by her side. It could cause a problem at a later date, of course, if she decided to move against them, but there are ways of managing that. At least for the duration of the mission, she’ll fall in line. And after? Well, that will take care of itself.

He presses a button on the arm of his chair, and an intelligence drone springs to life in front of him. “Yes, sir?” it says. “May I be of assistance?”

“Reply to Operative Lawson,” he says. “And tell her that the plan should proceed as previously instructed.”

“Of course, sir. Anything else?”

“Yes.” He takes another cigarette out of the pack. “Contact Operative Rasa. I want everything she has on Agent Garrus Vakarian. Tell her it’s for the Lazarus Project.”

“Of course, sir,” the done says, and collapses. The Illusive Man lights the cigarette, exhaling a plume of smoke with a satisfied sigh.

It’s always good when a plan comes together.

###### 

**ONE YEAR LATER**

###### 

It's official: he's fucked.

He's so fucked, he actually called his dad. He has spoken to his father exactly once since he promoted up for Spectre training, and that was only because Solana was on assignment and couldn't deliver the news of his mother’s diagnosis. He would have sworn that there was nothing in the 'verse that could force him to make contact with the old bastard, but a slow, imminent death has a way of changing the priorities.

"How are your thermal clips?" his dad asks, and Garrus doesn't even bother to glance over at his stash. He knows how low it is. If they keep throwing freelancers away like this, he might not even last until the big kids come out to play. And there's still the infiltration team, hiding down there in the kitchen like he's too stupid to turn on his thermals. He can't get a clear shot on them just yet, but he hasn't forgotten about them either.

"You know how it is. Could always use a couple more."

"Work with what you've got, then," his dad says, and it's the same low, steady instruction he always gives, to his subordinates and his children both. Garrus always used to resent that, when he was younger. Now it's obscurely reassuring. "You don't stop pulling that trigger until it clicks."

"Trust me. I intend to."

He sees movement at the barricade, and lays his cheek down along the rifle, sights down the scope. Four mercs, all human. Two male and two female, two in heavy armor and two in some kind of lean black-and-white bodysuits. His HUD pings a warning about dark energy on three of them, and all four are well-armed, packing expensive gear of good quality and in good condition. The woman in the lead has some kind of heavy weapon on her back that's damn near as big as she is.

_Well, they had to get wise at some point,_ Garrus thinks. Eventually they were going to find someone who wasn't just some greenie from the lowers, someone who might actually be able to make the push across the bridge. Garrus zooms in on the leader, trying to figure out what the hell that big gun is. A grenade launcher, maybe?

And then he sees the markings on her armor and almost drops his damn rifle.

"Garrus?"

"Still here, Dad." He refocuses with shaking hands, finds her again. She's standing just barely in cover behind one of the crates, visibly arguing with the other woman on her squad, and conveniently leaving her shoulder in clear view. A second look proves that the first wasn't his imagination: her dark armor has the Systems Alliance red-and-white stripe down the right arm, and the N7 insignia over the collarbone. Aria doesn’t generally let _anyone_ in uniform through her airlock, the odds of someone in full Alliance armor just waltzing through are… "Just checking something."

He’s a little out of date when it comes to inner-Rim intel, but the last time he had a count, there were thirty-seven active Alliance soldiers with the N7 designation. Sixteen of those are women, and only three of the sixteen are biotics. He frantically thumbs open his omni-tool, runs his biometric matching program, but the N7 doesn’t match any of the active profiles. In fact, based on what information he can pull at this distance, the closest biometric match would be...

But no. He's just thinking about Shepard, is all, down to the wire and surrounded by the dead. It makes sense that his mind would go to her - it always does in the quiet moments, even two years on - but it couldn't be her. Not really. That would be insane.

Wouldn't it?

The marine on the other side of the bridge is about a half-inch too tall and approximately three inches too broad through the shoulders, but the heavy armor could account for that. She used to wear lighter stuff before, asari-make preferably, stuff that let her move, relying on her biotics to soak up the damage if she had to. The energy signature from her amp is wrong; something new and unregistered that he doesn’t have on record, one of the new L5 experimental series coming out of Alliance labs. Then again, anything L3 and above is plug-and-play; she could have replaced it easily. She’s wearing a helmet, which is all kinds of wrong, but she _does_ have one of the most recognizable faces in the galaxy. She’d want to keep it hidden, to get through the gauntlet of half-baked mercenaries on the other side of the bridge.

_If_ it’s her.

"No matter how bad things are falling apart around you, as long as you have at least one bullet left, you can still get the job done, you understand?"

He watches as she stabs an angry finger towards the chest of the other woman and recognizes the disgusted flip of her hand, the cant of her hips, the way she rolls her right shoulder as she turns away. Gestures he's seen a hundred times, a thousand; things so familiar he knows them down to his bones.

He has to shift to take out a couple of intrepid freelancers who seem to think that a straight charge at a sniper's rifle is an excellent survival strategy, and when he shifts his sights back to her it's to see her staring back at him, the rifle from one of the mercs in her hands, sighting down the scope. He has to control his instinctive flinch, but he's got good cover and he knows it; it would take a sniper of his own caliber in order to make that shot, and it's not boasting to say that he's in the top fraction of a percent. Still, she almost certainly gets a good look at him, or at his helm, at least. He's made sure that he didn't have any identifying marks, but-

As he watches, she turns and tosses the rifle back to the merc, yanks off her helmet and tosses it aside, revealing short red hair and pale skin. The woman in her band says something sharp, with a vehement gesture, and the marine snaps something back. She pulls something out of one of the pockets on her belt, then slides the holovisor down over her eyes, turns it on with a quick flick of her fingers and shakes her head to settle it in a gesture so familiar it squeezes his heart. Her back is still mostly to him, but he can faintly see the blue light of the HUD at her temple, like that older Sentry model she snagged off an asari commando on Noveria as a trophy. She was so damn proud of that thing, jiggered it to enhance the targeting mechanism, even keyed it to her amp so she could focus her biotic hits just that extra fraction of a percent more. He remembers how she sweet-talked him into handing over some of the hacks he coded for his own, bribed him with a bottle of turian brandy, if he remembers correctly. He drank it with her while she had some of that spiced asari cider she loved, sitting side-by-side in the cargo bay of the _Normandy,_ doing some much-belated gear maintenance after a solid week of cleaning out geth strongholds. He said something stupid - trying to be clever, can't remember what it was now - and she laughed unexpectedly, a kind of deep belly laugh, threw her head back and all. _You're not as funny as you think you are,_ she still tried to say, and he shot back something like _still made you laugh, soldier,_ and she laughed again, piecing her rifle back together so fast it looked like her fingers were dancing on the barrel...

"Shepard," he whispers, and only realizes he's said it aloud when his father says sharply, "Garrus? You still with me?"

When she hops down off the barricade and he finally sees her face, he's not surprised at all. More than a little concerned that he's finally snapped... but not surprised. Of course it's her. Who else could it be?

"Yeah, Dad," he says, and follows Shepard with his scope, watches her left hand flare blue and the first strike crush the merc in front of her. "Yeah, I'm with you."

His dad exhales an unsteady breath in his ear. "Good. Then you finish up what you have to do there, and then you come home, okay? We have a lot to talk about."

In his scope, Shepard's pistol kicks and another merc falls. She doesn't even break stride. He lets out a little sigh of his own, picking off one of the freelancers on her heels on the exhale. "Yeah. You're right, we do have some stuff to work out. But I have to go now."

"Garrus-"

"I love you," he says, cutting him off. He's probably insane. He's almost certainly still going to die. He can give him this. "Don't worry about me. I'll make it home when I can."

He follows Shepard with his scope. It's probable that he's still hallucinating this, but if he is- well, it's not like he was ever going to walk out of here, anyway. If it's just a waking dream, he'd rather go out with his best friend in his sights than any other way.

"I think my odds just got a little better," he tells his father, and clicks off the call. If he's not dying today, he's going to give her one hundred percent of his attention.

It doesn't take her long for her squad to make it up to his nest; they spread out and eliminate the infiltration team with deadly force and military precision. Whoever her mercs are, they've seen service before, though the one in heavy armor keeps wandering off to make a shot on his own before Shepard can rope him back in with a hand signal, so he's likely used to working alone. Garrus does his part and picks off the ones on her tail, catching his second (third, fourth, fifth) wind with the old instinct to cover her six. He didn't make it this far just to let her go down, not if he still has a single heat sink left to burn.

One of the infiltration team manages to escape their notice, a twitchy human in Blue Suns armor, and he manages to actually get into good cover while Garrus is taking out one of his comrades that had a shotgun aimed at Shepard's head. There aren't any others coming across the bridge at the moment, either because they ran out of bodies or because they stopped the flow when they realized they had a traitor on the field, but Garrus isn't willing to leave even one of them through the perimeter- not even when he hears Shepard's familiar boot tread coming through the doorway on his right, a little heavier than he remembers but still there.

Still real.

"Archangel?" the female merc with her says, in a professional voice, and Garrus holds up one finger, keeping the merc in his scope. Little bastard has started to twitch, looks like he's going to risk a look-see around that pillar...

He hears Shepard cross her arms over her chestplate, and then her low, amused voice, like something right out of his dreams. "Never used to take you so long to aim, soldier."

_Fuck,_ Garrus thinks, her voice sending a shiver down his spine in spite of himself. If he's hallucinating, he's hallucinating _very vividly._

The merc gives in to the urge to peek, and Garrus's rifle _cracks_ in a headshot, clean as anything. He does a last scan for synthetics or life signs - nothing - and then hauls himself out of his kneeling position, propping the rifle's butt against the floor to propel himself up. He promptly half-falls sideways onto a nearby ammo crate when his knees prove unwilling to cooperate, and decides to keep leaning on his rifle if it means staying more-or-less upright. If he's going to be facing ghosts, he can at least do it with some semblance of dignity.

"And _you_ never used to bitch about quality. Commander."

She exhales an unsteady breath, and shoves her visor up onto the top of her head, stares at him with anxious green eyes. Now that she's close enough, he can see that her cheek is lined with a series of small, metallic red scars, and there's a disconcerting red flash behind her pupils, but it's still impossibly, _definitely_ Shepard.

"Take your helmet off," she demands, almost pleads. "Damn it, Garrus, take off your fucking-"

He fumbles open the catch on his helm, driven by the urgency in her voice, tugs it off more fast than careful and lets it drop down to floor with a clang. "Hell, Shepard, if you've come back from the dead for this I'm a lot more fucked than I thought."

He thinks he'll likely remember the look that comes across her face for the rest of his life. Pleasure, and exhaustion, and relief, and something else more complicated that he can't entirely name, but it sparks an answering roil in his chest. Something like, _I can't believe you're here but I'm so glad to see you._

She breathes out slowly. "Hey there, Stretch," she says. Her smile comes up slow but sure, and he has to clench his hands around the barrel of his rifle to keep from reaching out to grab her and make sure that she's real. She's... probably not a hallucination, at this point. And she does not take kindly to people getting handsy.

"Hey there, Ace," he echoes back, a call-and-answer forged in dozens, hundreds of firefights. It steadies him enough to add, with a decent approximation of his normal nonchalance, "So, is this a bad time to ask how you're not dead?"

"It's a medical miracle!" she chirps, and earns a snort from the man in heavy armor. "Honestly, I don't know. Some people spent a whole bunch of cred to pull my ass out of the wreckage. I've been up for less than a week."

"So, you were in, what, a coma or something?" _Why the hell didn't you reach out to us?_

Her gaze flickers quickly to the female merc, and then back again. "Or something. Look, it's kind of a long story. Way too long, considering the circumstances. What say I give you the whole thing over a drink after we get out of here, and you can tell me how you ended up fending off three merc gangs who hate you more than each other. Sound good?"

Garrus has been so sure that he's going to die here, for so long, that the thought of there being an _after_ seems almost as impossible as her standing before him. The thought of being able to sit down with two bottles between them, catch up on old times, just shooting the shit like the pair of old soldiers they are, just him and Shepard- it's impossible. It's unreal. A world where Shepard can rise from the dead and come storming back into his life just in the nick of time doesn't belong in the same universe as a world where his band (all but one of them, all but fucking one-) can be lying dead on the floor, victim of betrayal and his own fucking hubris. It doesn't seem fair. It doesn't seem _right._

"Sounds good, Shepard," he says, and he hopes she can't hear how exhausted he is, how worn and sore and sorrowful and generally fucked-up, but judging from the sympathy on her face, he's pretty sure she can. He hauls his aching carcass back to his feet, grinds his teeth till he feels marginally more alert, and then swings his rifle back up to his shoulder, sights down the scope. "Let's see what they're up to."

"We saw a good-sized group of mechs ready for deployment," the male biotic offers. "If I were them, I'd be sending those across first, to soak up some of your clips. They gotta figure on you running low."

"They figured right," Garrus mutters, thinking back to his conversation with his father. _As long as you have at least one bullet left.._. Shepard clears her throat.

"I picked up some extras on the way through the ground floor," she offers. "Plus everything we had on us already. That should buy us enough time to figure out a way out of here."

"If you think of something, let me know," he says. A minute later he sees movement coming over the barricade. "Yep, sure enough, they're sending in the mechs." He leans back up off the rifle and offers it to her. "Take a look."

She steps in close - he can smell her, salt and gun oil and ozone, some things haven't changed - and swings the rifle up to her shoulder, rather than kneeling to prop it on the windowsill like he expected. He frowns at her back. His Mantis isn't the biggest gun around, sure, but it's pretty solidly modded and heavy as shit. She's always been strong as an ox, always took point in the field, but he knows for a fact that even in her heyday she couldn't have lifted it that smoothly.

"Hmm," she says, and then the rifle _cracks,_ and his HUD informs him that one of the mechs is no longer active. "One less now, though."

"Nice," he says appreciatively, as she hands the rifle back over. _Well, her aim's just as good as ever._ "Well, don't suppose you'd like to give me a hand with the rest?"

"You know, it looks like my schedule is free for the afternoon," she says easily, and turns to her squad. "Lawson, how far does that overload hack of yours reach?"

The woman boots her omni-tool, takes a quick peek over the railing. "I can do it from here, Commander."

"Good. Pick your targets, stay low and don't get shot. Taylor, Massani, take the ground level, make sure no stragglers make it up the back steps to give us a nasty surprise. Garrus-" She grins at him. "May the best woman win?"

"You wish, Shepard," he tells her, and goes down to one knee, sets the Mantis onto the windowsill and sets up his shot while her crew scatters. He's not so proud as to keep on his feet on principle, not now that he's got people here to watch his back. Shepard takes the window to his left, and pulls out her sidearm with a faintly annoyed look. "Bet you're wishing you brought your rifle now, huh?"

"Shut it, Vakarian, I'm still going to kick _your_ ass," she says, and rolls down into an easy crouch. The sharp report of an assault rifle comes from below, and two mechs on the right flank fall in a shower of sparks. Garrus takes out another with a quick headshot, and then a wave of biotic energy roils up over the windowsill and hits three mechs in a single blast, sending them flying backwards like ragdolls. "Oh, would you look at that, I'm three up already."

"You don't get to count the one from before," he says, keeping his voice nonchalant. Muscle mass isn't the only thing that's improved. "That's cheating."

"I don't see why not."

"If you get to count that one, I get to count all the dozens before you showed up."

"That's fair." He takes out the last one still upright, and she snorts. "Fine. Still one up."

He sees one of hers doing its best to climb back up to its feet, and finishes it up before she can sight on it. "What was that?"

She gives a crack of laughter, and when he glances over at her, she's giving him a huge, affectionate grin. "I missed you, you asshole," she says, and offers up her hand, already curled into a fist. "It wouldn't be the same without you."

_Two years,_ he thinks, and taps her knuckles with his. "Yeah. I know the feeling."

###### 

Garrus doesn't remember doing his best to catch a rocket with the side of his face - which is, probably, a blessing. He also doesn't remember waking up gasping in a pool of his own blood, clutching his rifle and dragging it close to him like some kind of talisman, although Shepard assures him that he definitely did, and also, good to know he won't let go of his gun even with half his face blown off, _you're a real trooper, there, Vakarian_. Seeing as he was unconscious at the time, he definitely doesn't remember Shepard sliding across the floor to throw a barrier over him before the second shot could connect, ripping into the gunship with bullets and biotics alike until it was rendered down to scrap metal on the floor, but Taylor is quick to tell him about it later. As a warning or congratulations, Garrus isn't sure, but he's not really surprised to hear it. Shepard always took that sort of thing personally.

The last bit he can actually recall with any degree of clarity is when the gangs finally got smart and tried coming up from below, and Shepard took Lawson and Taylor with her to clear them out. She left Massani with Garrus to guard the back staircase, and he remembers her standing in the doorway, backlit by the hallway behind her, and her silhouette is still too bulky from the armor but the deceptively lazy line of her body is the same.

"Watch his back," she orders, and when Massani only gives a lazy wave of his hand- _yeah, yeah, get on with it-_ her voice hardens and Garrus is reminded that this is the woman who killed Saren Arterius with her own two bloody hands, a memory that has kept him warm on more than one long night. "He's still breathing when I get back, or you aren't. Clear enough for you?"

Massani does turn away from his rifle at that point, just enough to shoot her an annoyed look. "Yeah, sure, yer ladyship, think I can remember that."

Taylor visibly winces at the disrespect - yeah, that one saw service somewhere - but Shepard just laughs, like she always does, because Shepard is enough of an asshole to appreciate it in other people, and she doesn't have a damn thing left to prove. "Sure thing, cupcake," she chirps back, and then winks at Garrus and pulls her pistol. "Count is still on, don't think I'm going to let you win this one," she warns him. "And don't claim Massani's shots as yours, either."

"You don't need to cheat if you're good," Garrus retorts, and she laughs again as she heads down the hallway, Taylor and Lawson at her heels.

After that, it's all a bit of a blur. Dr. Chakwas tells him that's to be expected, considering the severity of his head trauma, and that he's frankly lucky it wasn't much worse. He goes in and out a few times over the next day or so, and sometimes Shepard's there and sometimes she's not, but she manages to get the basics through to him: that he's alive, that he's on her ship, that he's a bit stitched and bolted together at the moment but the grafts are taking fine, that none of the shrapnel caught his eye. He's pretty sure he makes her repeat the last one about six different times, something he'll find the time to be humiliated about later, but she's patient with him in her Shepard way, cracking jokes about his looks, aim, and sexual performance. He vaguely remembers laughing at something and then immediately regretting it when his face erupts in pain.

Still, the next thing he _clearly_ remembers is waking up to the white-noise hum of a medbay in the middle of third shift, covered by scratchy human blankets and surrounded by the smell of antiseptic and Shepard. He tentatively cracks open one eye, and when he isn't assaulted by bright lights he carefully turns his head to to find the woman herself sitting in a chair next to his bed, her feet crossed at the ankle and propped up against the mattress, her chair tilted rakishly back as she taps away on her omni-tool.

"Didn't they tell you visiting hours are over?" he says, and is immediately impressed by his own ability to get that sentence out on the first try. His voice is a little on the raspy side, but basically fine. And his jaw doesn't even scream at him too badly.

Shepard, that bastard, doesn't even look up from whatever she's writing. "I'm a rebel, Garrus. We've established this."

"You're sure something." His witty repartee for the moment exhausted, Garrus shifts to knock his knee against her boot. "Hey. Whatcha doin'?"

"Answering some of your messages," she says easily. The orange light of the omni-tool does strange things to the flat angles of her face, makes those strange dots she calls 'freckles' almost seem to glow against her pale skin. "You haven't even checked your inbox in like two months, did you know that?"

"I've been busy-" he starts to defend himself, and then glares when the rest of her statement catches up to him. He'd think she was joking, except, well. Shepard. He's seen her do worse. "Damn it, Shepard, get the hell out of my stuff."

"Nope."

"Give me that-"

She ducks away from his flailing hand and keeps typing. "This subscription to Fornax is vitally important, Garrus. Momma always told me that men have needs."

"You don't _have_ a mother. Shepard-"

"'course I had a mother, Garrus, I'm not a damn clone." She pauses, makes a wincing face. "Fuck, I hope I'm not a clone. Probably not? I mean, it wouldn't take two full years to clone someone, right?" She considers this a moment, batting him away absently. He's hampered by the blankets and his injuries, whereas she's in fine form despite her own still-healing scars and the thinness of her frame that he can see even in the low lighting. "Nah. You couldn't copy this. I'm too amazing to be anything but the genuine article."

"No one else is this full of themselves, that's for sure."

"I'm touched you feel that way, Garrus." And then she flicks her fingers and sends off the message before he can tear the damn omni-tool off her hand. "But not as touched as you're going to be with that subscription. Literally! They throw in a free neurostim program if you pay for two years in advance."

He settles back onto the pillows with a huff and glares at her. "You didn't actually sign me up for Fornax, did you?"

"Tempting! But no. I was sending out a general hey-I'm-not-dead tag to everyone you called in the last six weeks. Figured that'd cover your bases pretty well."

Garrus closes his eyes. Everyone he's contacted in the last six weeks includes eleven dead men, one who fled the scene, and his father. At least La- Sidonis will have a hard time sleeping knowing that Garrus is still out there, waiting to finish the job. His father-

"Might have been better if you hadn't done that, Shepard."

She levels him with a speaking look. "Yeah, and that's why I did it."

Coming from Shepard, that makes perfect sense. She's the most contrary bastard he's ever met, and he's met more than his fair share. She always pushed him to make peace with his father, too. Look how well that turned out.

"Boundaries are just one of those things for other people, aren't they?"

"Maybe if you'd changed your bio-locks sometime in the last two years you wouldn't have to worry about it. I couldn't believe it when it still recognized my voiceprint."

"Yeah, well." He clears his throat. It wasn't exactly on his list of worries, that she'd discover that little fact. It probably should have been. "You were dead, so I figured, what's the harm?"

And if he sometimes played back her voiceprint message - _I'm Commander Shepard, and on this day, June 13th, in the year of our Lord twenty-one-eighty-three, I have just outshot a Council Spectre. Suck on that, Vakarian!_ \- well. That's his business, and no one else's.

Shepard powers down her omni-tool with an absent-minded flick. His eyes adjust after only a moment to the sudden drop in ambient lighting, and her eyes may have a disconcerting red glow behind them but he'd still know that fondly exasperated look in his sleep.

"Sentimental bastard."

Where she's concerned? Definitely. Not that he'll ever admit to it. "I bet you say that to all the turians."

"Nah, just the ones that still answer my messages. Oh, wait! You didn't."

The thought of her trying to call him and getting only radio silence rides uneasy in his gut. Was he already under siege? Had he taken Sidonis's call? Was his team already dead? "When did you try to reach me?"

"Couple days ago. I was already on my way to Omega, but I wasn't exactly figuring that you were going to be there. Guess you had some other stuff going on."

After, then. He's not sure if he's relieved or not - if he'd taken the call, it wouldn't have made a damn bit of difference. But at the same time, he can't help but think how it might have gone down, in another world where he had Shepard at his back. If, if, if.

"I tagged all of the old gang," Shepard continues, heedless of the roil of his thoughts. "Except Tali, I saw Tali already, she gave me a fancy new shotgun, it was a whole thing. But most of the addresses bounced. Guess it's not surprising, considering."

There's not much he can say to that. "Well. It's been two years."

"Believe me, that is definitely starting to sink in."

The moment teeters on being dangerously serious, but then Shepard smirks and leans a little further back in her chair. "So. How, exactly, did you get yourself involved in a gang war on Omega? I thought I taught you better than that."

"You can't teach someone who's already perfect, Shepard, we've had this conversation." She snorts. "After your-"

He stalls out. For some reason, he can't bring himself to say the word, not with her sitting whole and mostly healthy in front of him.

"My funeral?" she supplies wryly, and he nods, grateful.

"Yeah. There wasn't much left for any of us to do, you know? The Council tried to hush everything up, nothing Anderson or I or anyone else could say to change things. So I gave up.” It’s harder to say out loud then he thought it would be. “Just- to hell with it, right? Bummed around the galaxy a bit, tried to find something to fill the hours. You know.”

She nods, her cheek twisting up in a rueful smile. “Yeah.”

“Then six months ago, I followed a target back to Omega, and figured there were plenty more where that one came from, so I set up shop. I started working on the gangs, and then things blew up in my face-"

"Literally."

"-and then you showed up. The end."

She gives him a skeptical look. "Something tells me there's more to the story."

"Yeah, well." The twisting sensation in his belly lets him know that he's not so ready to talk about it, not just yet. "You promised me a drink for the full story, Shepard. I'm not about to let you weasel out of a deal."

There's a little pause before she grins lazily, and just like that he knows he's understood. It may have been more than two years and a resurrection since he's seen her last, but they're still just as much on the same wavelength as they've always been. Spectres tend to work alone, but Shepard always made him rethink that. She's always able to anticipate him - his next move, his next shot, his next punchline - and meet him halfway. Sometimes _more_ than halfway.

Usually with an explosion.

"I'll get you that drink the next time I can pick up something dextro," she promises. "You be thinking of a good toast. I'm no good at the speechifying part."

"Don't worry, Shepard, I've heard your 'inspiring' speeches before."

She wrinkles her nose. "Worked, didn't it? We kicked ass, saved the world, walked away heroes. That's a win in my book."

She's not wrong. Everything that happened after... Well, that's one thing. But that day they stared death directly in the eye and dared it to do its worst, and when it did they still came out alive on the other side, and the other guy didn't. Even if Garrus never does anything else with his life, he can at least say that much.

"There's the toast, then," he says. "To us: the two biggest badasses to ever hold a gun."

"Shit yeah, I'll drink to that." She rocks a little further back in her chair, far enough that Garrus's hand twitches abortively to pull her back before he remembers that humans have a better center of gravity than turians. "How'd we end up on the count, by the way? You kind of got yourself shot up before I could tally."

Anyone else in the galaxy would hesitate before saying that - _you kind of got yourself shot up -_ but not Shepard. She just lazily wanders into conversational landmines like they're not there at all, and then dares them to blow up under her. It's kind of beautiful.

"I can't remember what my number was," he says. "What with the getting shot up."

"What?" She sits bolt upright, the metal legs of the chair hitting the floor with a resounding _clang_. "Aw, damn it, that's just not cool. I was at thirty-four. _For the record._ "

"You know what, Shep? Since you took down the gunship, let's give this one to you."

She crosses her arms over her chest and scowls at him like a sulking kid. "It doesn't count if you just give in like that."

He feels a dizzying rush of affection well up in his chest, and doesn't even bother to hide it on his face. What's the point of lying to Shepard? Who gives a shit if he's _too friendly_ with his best friend? She blinks back at him in surprise, but it doesn't quite fade away her pout until he says, "We'll start over next time, when we're both in better shape. Make it a fair fight."

"It's never a fair fight when I'm around, Vakarian, you should know that by now." But insulting him seems to cheer her up, so she slouches back into her chair, kicks her feet back up on the edge of the biobed. "It's really good to see you, you know. I know things'll actually go right for a change, with you around."

It's easily one of the finest compliments she's ever given him, and she's not generally stingy with her praise. He has to clench his jaw briefly before he can continue: "Whereas with you, I know things are about to get ridiculous."

"I'd be offended, but history's on your side with that one," she says philosophically. Shepard's luck is infamous. Judging by the fact that she just _came back from the dead,_ he doesn't see that changing anytime soon. "But, see, that's why I need to keep helpful people like you around. To balance things out."

_That's_ a segue too good to pass up. "Speaking of which. Who else was on that 'hey-I'm-not-dead' list of yours?"

"Liara, Wrex, Kaidan, Anderson," Shepard recites, ticking them off on her fingers. "Wrex is back on Tuchanka and bouncing offworld pings automatically, Kaiden's on an Alliance comms blackout, and Anderson is on a diplomatic block. Liara's on Illium - they tried to tell me to steer clear because she's supposedly working for the Shadow Broker now, but…"

She trails off, spreading her hands expressively, and Garrus can't help the snort of laughter that escapes him, even as it echoes painfully across his jaw. "Spirits, no," he gets out. "The opposite. She's trying to hunt him down."

"Really? She didn't tell me that." Shepard cocks her head to the side. "You two kept in contact?"

"I've… seen her a couple times." He smiles, not exactly with amusement. "I'm not sure what happened there. She went off the grid for a few months, and showed back up on Illium looking rough and started bullying her way to the top. I don't know what the Broker did to earn her ire, but- Hell, you know Liara. She's not the kind that gives up."

"No she is not," Shepard agrees, softly. "She mentioned you when I talked to her. Said she hadn't heard from you for months. Guess you were pretty set on ignoring your messages, huh?"

"Yeah, well." Garrus picks at his blanket. "She'd just want to nag me into going back to the Citadel. I didn't need to hear it."

"Stubborn," Shepard says, but fondly.

"Takes one to know one, isn't that what the humans say?"

"Yeah, something like that." She nudges at his knee with her toe, gentler than she'd usually be. "Not so stubborn I can't ask for help, though."

He smiles back at her, at her silly, serious face. As if that could ever be in question. "You don't need to ask, Shep. I'm with you all the way. Whatever that means."

"Oh," she says, her lips parting on a surprised breath, and then she looks away, her cheeks visibly darkening with a blush, even in the low ambient light of the medbay. "Well. Um. Good to know."

He reaches out - careful, daring - and cups his hand over the curve of her booted ankle. "I do have one question, though," he says, very seriously. She clears her throat and looks back at him.

"What's that?"

He nods to the logo on the wall behind her. "Why exactly are we on a Cerberus ship?"


	2. Chapter 2

Garrus misses out on Shepard's next excursion, though not for lack of trying on his part. Apparently he's "still confined to medbay" and "your face is still stapled on" and "it's a plague that kills turians, for chrissake don't be so goddamned stubborn," all of which Garrus not-so-privately thinks is bullshit. Still, Shepard at least looks sympathetic to the fact that he's not okay with her walking off the ship without him, although she expresses it by clapping him on the shoulder and telling him to "Go talk to Kelly, she appreciates species diversity almost as much as I do," with a suggestive wink and a gesture so filthy it's technically illegal on a few planets.

He does not go talk to Yeoman Chambers, or at least not immediately. First he goes to find Joker, because he knows that Joker will have the best rundown of the situation, without Shepard's, ahem, _unique_ way of looking at things. He and the helmsman never really got along, exactly, nothing in common and a lot of attitude on both sides, but he could respect the man's skill as a pilot and Joker seems to respect his ability to kill people, so it used to work out well enough. Plus, Joker was the only one who could get halfway decent dextro rations onto an Alliance ship. Garrus would never want to alienate someone that useful.

Shepard told him about their mission, about Cerberus and the Collectors and the empty colonies, but Joker is able to tell him about Shepard - as much as he knows, anyway, which is clearly less than he'd like. She was woken up early, perhaps a few weeks before she was fully ready to come out of her medical coma. She had to shoot her way out of the medical facility they were keeping her in because someone tried to sell them out to the Collectors. She’s got a whole bunch of fancy new tech in that rebuilt body of hers: cybernetic implants in her joints, biotic conduits in her nerves, synthetic lattice in her bones and skin. She's not fully healed, but she is good at hiding that fact. She's gotten into three separate shouting matches with the Illusive Man in the space of ten days.

And she is not okay.

"I mean, she's definitely Shepard, don't get me wrong. But she's definitely a little... off. I thought she was going to hug me when I showed up," Joker admits. "Holy crap, can you imagine? First of all because she could break me by breathing too hard, but also..."

He makes a complicated hand gesture that's presumably supposed to encompass all of the ways with which Shepard is very fond of her personal space, and Garrus nods in understanding. Most humans tend towards the physically gregarious end of polite interactions, but Shepard's always been more spartan when it comes to personal space. Almost turian. He wasn't the only one who noticed it, either: Ash always joked that Shepard must've gone into the military because all that saluting meant that no one expected you to shake hands. She was more relaxed with her team, a friendly pat on the arm or her shoulder jostling against your in the drop shuttle, but even then it was just another thing for her, friendly and easy. Now she seems to _need_ company in a way she never did before. The past two days she barely left the infirmary, and then only when Chakwas chased her out.

"Has she talked to anyone?"

" _Shepard?"_ Joker gives that consideration the respect it deserves. "No. The Illusive Man tried to sneak a therapist onto the ship as one of the crewman, but Shepard spotted _that_ at ten paces."

Something clicks in his head. "Yeoman Chambers?"

"Got it in one. Why, you already spill your guts?"

He sighs. Should have known she was up to something. Not that she hasn't tried to get him laid before, but usually not in _quite_ this kind of stressful circumstance. "No, but Shepard tried to get me to talk to her."

"Sounds like the commander. Thoughtful, but in a hypocritical sort of way. Currently she's been describing her sexual conquests in chronological order every time Chambers tries to get personal, you might want to try that one. Or maybe she'd like that too much, tall handsome hero such as yourself."

Half of his face is in ruins, but pointing that out hits a little close to home until he can bring himself to make eye contact in the mirror, so instead he contents himself with a mild, "Something you want to tell me, Moreau?"

Joker responds with a raised finger. "In your dreams, birdman. Me personally, I've been going the 'offensive jokes' route, since I figure I'll pretty much never run out of those. And she's just the kind of bright-eyed, politically correct young muffin that I never expected to see with Cerberus, so it's _really_ effective."

"Cerberus is not an inherently speciesist organization, Mr. Moreau," EDI's dulcet voice informs them. Garrus doesn't jump, but only because he's too far gone to be startled by such mundane surprises anymore. Joker does, and immediately looks pissed about it. "Its mandate is to promote human interests in the galactic community, not to denigrate other races."

Joker grimaces at the 'aesthetically neutral' globe that the AI uses as a holo-avatar. "Didn't I mute you?"

"Despite what you appear to believe, there is no mute function for this program," EDI replies placidly.

"Now that's a design oversight if even I've seen one."

"It was, in fact, a deliberate decision on the part of the ship's creators, Mr. Moreau."

"Aaaaand just another reason why you can't trust Cerberus to make good decisions."

Garrus elects to discreetly remove himself before he gets sucked into the bickering, and backs out of the cockpit with Joker none the wiser. EDI, of course, probably notices his exit, being a sentient piece of machinery with cameras everywhere, but EDI is at least polite enough to let him leave without comment. _Well,_ he thinks philosophically, _if I have to get stuck on a ship built by human terrorists and crewed by an AI, at least she's a_ nice _AI. Could be worse._

The crew members all give him awkward sideways glances as he passes by, and he realizes with an unsettling shiver down his spine that this is probably the closest many of them have been to a turian in some while. Maybe ever. Cerberus recruits heavily from ex-Alliance and colony brats, people with no real ties to the galactic community at large. Given what he's heard about the Illusive Man, he doesn't think he would have been stupid enough to crew Shepard's ship with a bunch of supremacists or isolationists, but even the friendliest faces of Cerberus probably don't know what to do with a alien in their midst, especially a much larger and well-armed alien. It's... a complication.

Previously intent on going straight back to the medbay to maybe get some extra sleep, he decides to detour over to the control station, where a petite human woman with short, light brown hair is busying herself over a message terminal. "Excuse me," he says politely, and has his best 'I'm-charming-not-dangerous' smile ready for when she turns around. The effect is probably ruined a little along with his face, but by the immediate look of sympathy in her wide eyes, it probably works for a different reason now. "Are you Yeoman Chambers?"

"I am!" she says, and he almost winces away from the force of her enthusiasm before he reminds himself that he's on a mission. "And you must be Agent Vakarian. It's so good to see you up and around; we've all been so worried about your recovery."

_Not all of you,_ he thinks. "It's very nice to meet you, Yeoman. And please, call me Garrus."

Her smile is like the sun coming out from behind the clouds: immediate and blinding. "Okay, Garrus, then you should call me Kelly. Is there something I can do for you today?"

She's actually very smooth. If Joker hadn't warned him, he might not have caught the faint tinge of calculation behind her smile, the assessing tilt to her head. She'd make a good con artist, and she's probably an excellent therapist. His reflexive distrust would probably still have won out, but he imagines that she normally has no trouble whatsoever getting people to open up to her.

He smiles, ignoring the ache in his jaw. "Well, I know I'm technically supposed to be confined to medbay..." Cue sheepish shrug; Kelly grins. "But I was hoping to get started figuring my way around while Shepard's off-ship. If I know her, she's going to have me hit the ground running when she gets back, so I'd like to get a bit of a jump start so I might have a chance at keeping up."

"Oh, I'm sure you keep up just fine!" she says, and giggles. The faintest of blushes spreads across her cheeks and he smiles back, fascinated. She is _good._ Good, and possibly just a little bit sincere. Which is... interesting. Shepard's far from the only human he's seen play around outside of her own species, but most go for asari, maybe a drell if they're feeling adventurous. There's a lot of bad blood between humans and turians, and not a lot of biological similarities. To find someone willing to cross _that_ particular species barrier on a Cerberus ship is unusual, to say the least. He's not entirely sure what it means, but he's got the time to figure it out.

"Maybe, but the head start will definitely be appreciated," he says. "She mentioned that you all were short a gunnery officer, and that she was hoping I could fill in. Could you maybe give me a quick tour?" Rueful smile. "This boat is a lot bigger than the old _Normandy._ "

"Oh, I'd love to!" she says. "Let me just finish this message real quick, and I can show you around. You're going to be so impressed!"

He hits her with his best inviting smile, and watches her blush spread a little further. "I'm sure I will."

###### 

Shepard comes back two days later, a very talkative Dr. Solus in tow, hauling all sorts of equipment in cases. Lawson is protesting, probably not for the first time judging by the resignation in her voice, that he doesn't need any of it, that the _Normandy_ lab is well-stocked with cutting-edge technology. Dr. Solus just waves it away.

"Nonsense! Specialized equipment, very rare. Experimental. Of my own design. Cerberus tech good, very good, but not me. These are small things. Trifles. Plenty of room. Cannot stifle quality, Commander."

Shepard meets Garrus's gaze over the top of the doctor's head and bites her lip against a grin, her eyes brimming over with suppressed amusement. "Wouldn't dream of it, Doc," she says. "Would you like the tour?"

Solus blinks his huge eyes. "Would rather get started."

"My kind of man." Shepard gestures towards the cases. "Miranda and Jacob will help you get settled. I'd like a project assessment first thing tomorrow, and then we can work on getting you anything else you might need. That work for you?"

"Very good," Solus sniffs. "Which way to lab?"

"I'll show you," Lawson says, grabbing another pair of cases and setting off down the walkway. "This way."

Taylor grabs the rest and follows her, leaving Garrus alone with Shepard by the airlock. He leans against the bulkhead and gives her an arch look. "So you cured the plague, huh?"

"Mordin cured it, I just killed all the vorcha that were keeping him from deploying it," she says with a wave. "I'll get you the report later. But you. You've got some 'splaining to do, big guy."

He tilts his head. "Gonna have to give me a little more than that, Shepard," he says, amused. "There's just so _many_ things that could cover."

She punches him in the arm - all the more painful because it's unexpected. Also, she's still got her gauntlets on, and he's in his shirtsleeves. "Ow, what the fuck, Shepard!"

“Why didn’t you tell me you quit the Spectres!”

“...ah.”

“Yeah, _ah._ ” She folds her arms over her chest and glares up at him. “You didn’t think this was maybe something I needed to know?”

“It didn’t seem relevant at the time.” He rubs his hand over his arm. She hasn’t learned to pull her punches since she came back, that’s for damn sure. “How did you find out, anyway?”

"From the horse’s mouth.” She shifts from side to side, still riding a little high on annoyance but not quite like she’s going to punch him again, which is something, at least. "I got in touch with Anderson while I was down on Omega. Figured it was my best chance to avoid Cerberus ears. Used an old tag I got off his console back in the day-"

_Of course she did._ "Shepard, one of these days someone is going to wring your neck."

"He was under a diplomatic block, I had to find something he'd have coded in as an exception! Whoever it was, he must like them a lot, because he was not happy to see someone else at the other end of the line. And then he figured I was some kind of lookalike or whatever, so _that_ took a while to settle out. But once the cursing died down, he seemed pretty glad that I’m back.”

“Yeah,” Garrus says. “That can’t really come as a surprise, Shep.”

Her face says that it came as a surprise to _her,_ which is sad but not entirely surprising in and of itself. Shepard’s always had this slightly heartbreaking tendency to put a lot into her friendships, and not expect much back in return. That always went double for the small handful of commanding officers that she actually _liked._

“Yeah, well,” she says, brushing that away. “We didn’t want to get into it too much over an unsecured channel, but I told him about Joker, and Chakwas, and I said I’d found you. And that’s when he told me you _quit._ ”

“Technically, I’m on a ‘leave of absence,” Garrus corrects, with a smile he doesn’t feel. “Spectres don’t actually quit. They have to be voted off during a Council session, same as when we get inducted.”

“Yeah, but you haven’t exactly been taking their calls, either,” Shepard says. She peers up into his face, and her annoyance fades, replaced by a concern that’s much harder to face. “Seriously, Vakarian. What the hell? I know how much being a Spectre meant to you. What changed?”

He thinks back to her funeral - not the actual one, which Anderson managed to keep private, but the big public memorial held in the presidium, with the Council presiding. He remembers the pageantry of it, the sheer political _bullshit,_ and he gets angry all over again at how eager everyone was to claim Shepard’s deeds as their own while spitting on everything she fought for, everything she believed. Anderson tried, Garrus knows he tried, but spirits, even for the Citadel, the sheer hypocrisy of it all was too much.

“Let’s just call it a difference of opinion,” Garrus says, and changes the subject. “I’m guessing if Anderson knows you’re alive, the Council is going to want to see you to discuss this turn of events.”

That earns him a quick sideways look, his change of subject not unnoticed, but she gets it go, just like he knew she would. Shepard can be tactful when she feels like it; she's only ever rude on purpose. “Yeah, I got the summons already. Official and everything; I guess Anderson handed over my new comm address.”

“How are they handling the Cerberus thing?”

“Won’t know till we get there.” She gives him a keen look. “That going to be a problem for you? With your less-than-friendly relationship at the moment, I mean. Thanksgiving with the family’s awkward enough without Uncle Jim promising a whoopin’ for knocking up the neighbor’s girl.”

He gets maybe a third of that metaphor, but it’s enough to catch her meaning. “It’ll be fine,” he says. He can feel his mandibles pulling tight against his jaw with tension, making a lie of his words. “I was never important enough to be worth the effort of firing me. We’ll probably do what we’ve done for the last year, and politely ignore each other’s existence.”

She looks at him dubiously, then shrugs. Shepard was always one to let people make their own mistakes. “Alright, Stretch, if you’re sure.” She puts a hand to her ear, taps open her comms. “Joker, set course for the Citadel.”

“...you sure about that, Commander?”

“No, but we’re doing it anyway.”

“Business as usual then, got it. I’ll lay in the course, Commander. Should be there by late this afternoon.”

“Roger that.” Shepard drops off the call, then sighs and drops her hand to her side. “Well, there we are. Hey, maybe if we’re lucky, they’ll even be willing to lend a hand.”

He just looks at her.

“Well, it could happen,” she says, the corners of her eyes creasing up in a smile. “Us defeating Saren proved that miracles do occur.”

“I think you might’ve used those up where the Council is concerned.”

“True. Still, even if they’re as useless as usual, I’ve got a few things we can handle while we’re there, make sure the visit stays productive.”

That one earns her a suspicious look. Garrus knows better than to fully trust Shepard's idea of productivity. "How, exactly?"

"Relax." She starts back towards the armory, probably to get out of the combat gear she's still wearing, and Garrus falls in at her heels automatically. "I made contact with one of the names on the Illusive Man's list. She's agreed to meet me on the Citadel. Apparently she's finishing some business there."

Shepard puts just enough of a lean on the word _business_ that Garrus guesses, "Smuggler?"

"Hah! Close. Thief."

He tilts his head. "For a combat mission?"

"Garrus, Garrus." She shakes her head sorrowfully. "All this time around me and you still haven't figured out how to think outside the box. Have I taught you _nothing_?"

"Quickest way to get into a barfight with a batarian." Garrus gives a quick nod to Kelly as they pass, who smiles starrily at him and Shepard both. Bigger shine for Shepard, though. Also interesting. "Best way to headbutt a krogan if you don't want to knock yourself unconscious. How to shotgun a beer, which is especially useless because I can't even drink them."

"See, what you call 'useless,' I call 'important cultural knowledge.'" She nods back at Kelly and heads into the armory, hitting the seal to close the doors after her. “Security on a vault and security on a mech aren’t all that different, at the top level. I think she’ll do just fine.”

Shepard’s always had an eye for talent - the more unusual, the better. Not many people could take a pair of by-the-book Alliance marines, a krogan mercenary, an asari scholar and a whiz-kid quarian and make them into crew, but Shepard’s got the knack. “No argument from me, then.”

“I gotta win one once in a while, right?” She starts undoing the mag-seals on her armor and he leans up against the nearby table, settling in to watch her. She scrunches up her nose, trying to look aggrieved and failing when her lips twitch in an irrepressible smile. “You know there’s people who’d pay a lot of money to see this show.”

“In your dreams, Shepard.” She looks tired. Not that he’s great at human biology, but she seems thinner than she should be, paler. The bones in her face are a little more prominent than he remembers, and there’s shadows under her eyes that make her seem bruised, fragile-looking. He doesn’t need the still-faintly-visible spiderweb of red just below the skin in her cheek to tell him she’s not back to a hundred percent. “You need to stop letting your ego do the talking for you.”

“First of all, that’s never going to happen. Second of all, it’s not ego if it’s true. I had three separate people offer me piles, literally _piles_ of credits for an exclusive line of vids, just _today._ Plus there was that one guy who wanted to pay me ten credits to punch him in the face.”

“Oh yeah?” he says, grinning back at her. “And what’d you do?”

“Do I look like the sort of woman to pass up easy money? Honestly, Garrus. And here I thought we were friends.”

“I’m a fool to doubt you, Shep.” He watches her peel out of her chestplate and start on her greaves. “I talked to Yeoman Chambers while you were gone.”

Shepard’s got a good poker face, but not good enough to hide from state-of-the-art biometric sensors. “Oh yeah? She’s really got a thing for tall, dark, and inhuman, ifyouknowwhatImean. You’ve definitely got an in there if you’re looking to get back in the saddle.”

“Unlike you, Shepard, I’m not interested in _interspecies diversity._ ”

“Hey, I’m just saying, you could stand to expand your horizons a little. You don’t know what you’re missing. I mean, everyone makes it with an asari at some point, but there’s a whole world of sexual adventure out there waiting for you, Vakarian. You just have to reach out and take it.”

“Well, hopefully I’d at least say hello first.” He crosses his arms over his chest. “You can stop trying to figure out if you’re busted, by the way. I already talked to Joker.”

“Curses, foiled again.” She spreads her hands into a shrug, then starts working on the catches to her gauntlets. “It wasn’t personal, you get that? Just thought I’d put it out on offer if you want.”

“Yeah, I know how you work.” Her pale fingers are quick and graceful on the fastenings. He’s never really understood why humans and asari particularly _need_ those extra digits, but they seem to do alright with them. “Let me make you a deal: I will if you will.”

She looks up from her gauntlet. “It’s gonna be like that, huh?”

He holds her gaze. “Offer’s there if you want.”

“Touche.” She looks back down to her armor, pulls off one gauntlet and swaps to the other. “But nah. Who wants to deal with therapy, anyway? All that… sincerity, and honesty, and talking about _feelings…_ ” She gives a delicate shudder. “That’s what alcohol’s for.”

Ah, Shepard. Apparently there’s some things even death can’t change. “Well, you do still owe me that drink,” he says, and straightens away from the table, gives her a friendly pat on the shoulder. “Maybe you can buy me something on the Citadel.”

###### 

Shepard's an exclamation point of tension the entire time the _Normandy_ is going through checkpoints, like she's afraid someone's going to notice the Cerberus symbol on the side and shoot them out of the sky, and as soon as they're finished docking she's out the airlock and halfway down the terminal like a shot out of a cannon. Garrus trades a rueful look with Joker and follows at a more leisurely pace, signalling to close the airlock behind him. For this trip, it's just the two of them; no need to borrow trouble when there's plenty enough close at hand.

There's a long line at the main entrance checkpoint, and after a silent argument conducted almost entirely through increasingly annoyed facial expressions they elect to kill some time grabbing some food at one of the vendor stalls. None of them look to be dual-chirality, so they split up; Shepard to get something she calls a _burrito_ and him to get entha skewers. His mouth is watering just thinking about it; between his siege on Omega and Shepard's all-too-human ship, he hasn't had anything but basic dextro rations for close to two weeks now. He should really try to pick up some supplies while he's here, even if it's just a few non-perishables, maybe some spices or something. It's going to be a long few months if all he has is field rations.

The vendor gives him a deeply judgmental look when he hands over the order, due to the amount of food or possibly the state of his face, Garrus isn't sure which and doesn't care. He pays the exorbitant fee (dockside vendors are all crooks) and has the first skewer down his gullet in about ten seconds flat.

The second he enjoys at a slightly more reasonable pace, but he's still finishing his fourth (and, tragically, final) skewer by the time he wanders down the terminal to the agreed-upon meeting place with Shepard. Shepard isn't there, because _of course she isn't,_ but when he sends an inquisitive ping from his omni-tool hers pings him back from only about thirty feet away around a corner. He tosses the rest of his trash into a nearby incinerator and is busy wiping his hands clean when he ambles around the corner and comes close enough to hear Shepard... talking. To an advertisement.

"Nobody warned me about some big heist," she's saying. "I feel like I would have remembered if someone told me I was supposed to help you steal something."

He's about to interrupt and delicately inquire if she might need to go lay down for a bit, maybe talk to Chakwas - but then the holoprojector's speakers crackle and he hears, "From what I've heard about the Illusive Man, that doesn't exactly surprise me. He seems like the need-to-know type. Still, that was the deal I made. If you're not interested I can reach out to a different client."

"No, I'm interested," Shepard tells it. "Just surprised." She looks up when Garrus comes over to stand next to her. "Hey."

"We have conversations with ad banners now?"

"We have conversations with people who hack ad banners," Shepard corrects. "Because they like playing games and won't meet face-to-face."

"Let me guess," Garrus says dryly. "That thief you wanted to recruit?"

"I prefer 'infiltration specialist,'" Kasumi Goto informs them through the speakers. "It sounds so much nicer, don't you think?"

The banner's security is laughable, and Garrus loops onto the hacked signal, follows it back to the source. His visor pings a notification, and he turns, tracks it up to the nearby catwalk where a small, trim figure in black is looking down at them.

"You can call it whatever you like," he says, looking directly up at her. "As long as you can keep up with the big kids."

"Oh, I like him," she responds, and it's in their earpieces now, rather than through the ad banner. Garrus isn't too ashamed to say that he jumps, and though Shepard hides it better, she definitely does too. She's _good._ He's not sure Tali could have hacked them that quickly, and until today he would have said that she's the most gifted tech he's ever met. "Can we keep him?"

"He's my partner, of course I'm keeping him," Shepard drawls. Garrus presses palm to heart with all mocking sincerity and earns himself an eye-roll. "The question was whether we're keeping _you._ I gotta say, it's a hell of an audition."

"Little dramatic for my tastes," Garrus puts in, "but I can't fault the skill."

Garrus focuses his visor on Goto's face, and even with the hood and her ducked chin, he can still catch the smug smile that spreads across her face. "That's what they all say. So, how about it, Commander? Think you'd be willing to agree to the deal?"

"What the hell," Shepard decides. "I've never gone to a fancy party before. I'm always up for new experiences."

"It's going to be fun," Goto declares. "Well, I've got some business to wrap up if I'm going to be gone for a while, but I'll meet you on the ship!"

"Be there by shift change tomorrow morning," Shepard tells her. "I'm not planning on sticking around here long."

"Got it, Commander," Goto says, and tosses off a lazy salute before disappearing with the _bzzk_ of a tactical cloak. Shepard shakes her head once before turning back to him.

"Hi."

"I can't take you anywhere," he tells her solemnly, and she laughs, a lot of the tension that's been riding her for the past few hours eased by the banter. It'll be good to have someone like Kasumi on the ship, he thinks. He and Joker can't be the only two people on Shepard's crew with a damn sense of humor.

"C'mon," she says, and brushes past him with an affectionate bump of her hip. "Whatever else happens up there, at least we accomplished something from this little jaunt."

"You're an eternal ray of optimism, Shepard."

She pauses when she gets to the end of the (now much shorter) line at the security checkpoint and grins smugly up at him. "Aren't I just?"

"Did you even get your burrito?" he says, noticing her empty hands.

"Got and ate." She holds up her palms about eight inches apart. "A true feast."

"You're like a black hole."

"Hey, I was dead for two years, I've got some catching up to do."

"That's your excuse and you're sticking to it?"

"Something like that."

At the checkpoint the guard gives them a very unimpressed look at their weapons, until he and Shepard tag over their Spectre authorizations. The guard's look changes to resignation, and she waves them through. Shepard bumps him with her elbow.

“Admit it. You’d be sad without all the bells and whistles.”

Slowed down, more like, but Omega proved it’s nothing he can’t work without if he has to. He became a Spectre to cut down on the amount of red tape in his life, but it’s not worth politicians using that same red tape to hang his best friend in effigy. He may not be a very good turian, in the larger sense, but he’s got the part about _personal loyalty_ down just fine.

“That’s why I have you, Shepard. To keep me in the leisure to which I’ve become accustomed.”

“Oh, I see how it is.” She stares down the hallway at the ID scanner and sighs. "As soon as I walk through that thing Anderson's going to call me and tell me to get my ass upstairs, isn't he?"

"I'm amazed he didn't do it when the _Normandy_ docked," Garrus says honestly. "But it _is_ why you came here, you know. To at least try to make the Council see reason."

"I know, I know, just- ugh." She looks at the checkpoint again, looks back at the docking terminal behind her, looks up at him. "If this all goes pear-shaped, you've still got my six, right?"

"Always," he tells her, and he’s never meant anything more. "You're my partner."

She exhales slowly. "Okay, then. Let's go face the goddamn music."


	3. Chapter 3

Shepard orders Joker to set course for Osun practically as soon as she's hit the airlock, and stomps off to the armory with an almost visible storm cloud of temper over her head. Garrus leaves her to it: she always did like to tend to her weapons when she was pissed, and if Taylor's not in there she'll be able to kick the walls a few times and calm down. Either way, his presence would not be appreciated.

Instead, he sticks his head into the cockpit where Joker is starting the preflight checks. "Sorry about the short notice."

"Are you kidding? I'm surprised she lasted this long. I had a bet on with Hawthorne that she'd turn around before she even made it up to the Presidium."

"How much you lose?"

"Ten credits."

"And that should teach you not to bet against Shepard."

“Yeah, you’d think I’d learn.” Joker swivels his chair and pins him with a look. “Sooooo, how’d it go?”

Garrus just looks at him. Joker winces.

“That good, huh?”

“Could have been worse.” Garrus lets out a slow breath. “Could have been a lot worse, actually. They decided to uphold her Spectre status. Mind you, not like they could have revoked it, not with Anderson right there and the political shitstorm he was all but promising to bring down if they tried, but they were still pretty gracious about it. As long as we keep our _activities,_ quote-unquote, to the Terminus, they won’t try to interfere.”

Joker’s eyebrows creep up behind the brim of his hat. “Uhhh, they realize we might not be able to follow that, right? The Collectors have been focusing on the outer rim colonies, but…”

“Yeah. I know. I think they were mostly trying to save face.” He sighs and rubs his hand over the back of his head. “Still, next time we’re here we should probably take a shuttle. And maybe scrub the Cerberus logo off it first. Just to be on the safe side.”

“Cerberus is a legitimate corporation with many active dealings in Citadel space, Agent Vakarian,” EDI says. Her voice is just this side of chiding.

“I don’t think the Council sees it that way.”

“Gee, and I wonder why.” Joker looks up at him. “What about you, _Agent_ Vakarian? Way I heard it, you dropped way the fuck off the grid a year back. They spank you and send you off to bed without supper?”

Garrus rolls his shoulders into a shrug, feeling uncomfortable at Joker’s sudden scrutiny. “Too busy dealing with Shepard, I guess.” He’s pretty sure they were deliberately ignoring him, actually, but that suits him just fine. Spectres don’t quit, like he told Shepard, but every once in a while one of them ‘disappears.’ He’s got a feeling that he’s not the first to get fed up and leave Council space. In their way, the Council was probably doing him the honor of respecting his informal resignation. “I didn’t get fired either, if that’s what you’re asking.”

“It wasn’t, but good enough.” Joker snorts and turns back to the console. “So we came all this way just for nothing to happen. Good job, very effective use of our time.”

“Better than ignoring them and having to dodge arrest warrants,” Garrus points out. “Besides, we picked up a new inmate for this crazy train. It wasn’t a complete waste.” He checks the time; not quite three hours since they got here. They’re about twelve hours short of Shepard’s morning shift change deadline. "Did Kasumi Goto ever show?”

"Ms. Goto arrived one hour and twenty-two minutes ago, Agent Vakarian," EDI informs him. Joker snorts.

"If by 'arrived' you mean she tried to break the airlock security and got zapped by our resident ship cancer here, then yeah, she showed her face a while back."

"Her access program was quite sophisticated," EDI notes. She sounds pleased, as much as she sounds anything aside from pleasantly neutral. "It was of a type colloquially referred to as a 'cracker,' and heavily customized. I theorize it was of her own design."

Interesting. "If you hadn't been on lookout, could she have gotten through the security VI?"

"Of course not," Joker says, at the same time as EDI says, "It's very likely."

"Seriously?" Joker asks. "Oh well that's just _great._ "

But Garrus is thinking about the security specs he pulled up for the _Normandy._ It's state-of-the-art, just like everything else on board, including some aspects that are experimental. The Illusive Man didn't just leave the security concerns to their resident AI, but ensured that any number of failsafes were built into the system, just in case of system shutdown. In theory, it would take a thief familiar with the design to build a program that could get through. In theory.

_Very_ interesting. "Glad you were on lookout, then. I assume you actually let her on board at some point?"

"Of course," EDI says, with just a hint of chastisement in her voice. _Just enough to sound like a person,_ the cynical part of his brain says. "She had the appropriate access codes, and her biometric data matched that which Commander Shepard sent ahead when she notified me of a new crew member. She was fully authorized to enter."

Garrus hadn't noticed Shepard taking biometric readings, but then he's not the only one with a customized visor. It's likely she took the scans and had them sent to EDI before she'd ever finished inviting Goto to join them. "That's good to know." Then something worrisome occurs to him. "Where did Lawson assign her quarters? She's not in the crew bunks, is she?" He can only imagine what sort of chaos might result from a thief with her sense of humor bunking in with a gaggle of gung-ho Cerberus crew, but either way he's pretty sure that Shepard isn't going to want to deal with it down the line.

“No, Agent Vakarian. The port lounge is currently unused by most crew members, so I have instructed her to reside there for the time being. She is currently unpacking.” A pause. “I believe at least some of the goods in her possession are stolen property.”

“Well, she is a thief,” Joker says. “It’d be kind of a disappointment if they weren’t.”

“The man has a point. It’s not like we’re suddenly going to get _more_ illegal.”

“Great, and now I’ve got the turian agreeing with me. It must be the end times.”

The two of them share a friendly smirk, and then Garrus nods to the door. “I’ll be up in the gunnery if Shepard ever comes out.”

“Yeah. Real big surprise there.”

###### 

Left to his own devices, he takes the time to play catch-up on some of his gear. His rifle’s in perfect shape, _obviously,_ but he's got the feeling that the collar on his armor might be a dead loss. Still, as long as the seals aren't blown he might chance it for a while. He has a fair bit of cred stashed on Omega, but he can't exactly risk going back there to retrieve it any time soon. Maybe in a month or two, after the excitement has died down a bit.

Shepard comes sulking in to join him a few hours later. "I'm hiding," she warns him, pulling an exaggerated face of disdain that he thinks is probably supposed to represent Miranda, and curls up on his bedroll down the steps where she isn't visible from the door. "Don't let her find me."

He gives her a disbelieving look. "We're twenty feet from her office. She can probably _hear_ you."

"Shut up."

"Very mature. Very commanding. A natural-born leader, that's what you are."

"And don't you forget it," she says, and pulls out a datapad. He eyes the way she's burrowing into his sleeping nest, and decides that discretion is probably the better part of valor. Shepard doesn't smell too weird, as humans go. And boundary-crossing is like a sport with her.

They keep companionable silence as he finishes with his armor - which has intact seals, so he can get away with using it for a little while longer - and starts polishing his Mantis. Eventually she makes a particularly frustrated noise and he eyes her sidelong. "What're you working on, anyway?"

"Bills, if you can goddamn believe it. I thought this was supposed to be an all-expenses-paid suicide mission! But apparently we need to handle at least some of our own cash flow."

Only Shepard would look at the expense of this mission and bitch about small change. "It's a tragedy."

“I’m just saying, we’ve got the fate of the galaxy at stake, why sweat the small stuff?” She sighs extravagantly, but when he doesn’t reward her with a response, huffs in annoyance and continues. “I think we’ve got it covered, though. Liara said she knew some mining companies on Illium that’d be happy to pay a bonus for any good mineral sources we scout out, people who won’t turn up their nose at the Cerberus stamp on the intel. With the sensor arrays on this beauty, it's easy money for us."

"'Us,' huh?"

She flashes him a grin. "You're on my crew now, Vakarian. I'm not stingy with the spoils."

"As long as I follow you into certain death, of course."

"No, that part's the bonus," she says, like talking to a particularly slow child. "I figured you wouldn't sign on without a little danger, so I decided to spice the pot a bit."

"You're all heart, Shepard."

"I'm a giver."

"Yeah, but of what?"

Before she can answer, EDI's calm voice announces, "Operative Lawson wishes to speak with you," and the doors whoosh open before he has a chance to tell it not to. Fuck. He had enough of AI when he fought the geth back in the day, he doesn't see why he has to put up with it on the ship.

"Agent Vakarian," Lawson says courteously, as Shepard does her damnedest to squinch down out of view. "I won't keep you. But if you happen to see Commander Shepard... around, would you please inform her that we'll be in Osun by oh-six-hundred tomorrow, and that Warden Kuril has been contacted to finalize arrangements. All she needs to do is to notify her squad."

"I'll be sure to pass the word along," Garrus says with a straight face, and Lawson nods.

"I appreciate it. Thank you."

She turns on her heel and walks back out, and Garrus very politely waits until the doors close again behind her before he looks back down at Shepard. "I think you're busted."

"I don't know what you're talking about, my hiding place is very clever." She uncurls, stretching out with a _pop_ that makes his spine ache in sympathy even as she groans in pleasure. "I'll let Kasumi and Massani know they're up."

She doesn't ask him to join her, and he doesn't bother to offer. They both know he will be, so why waste time on the niceties? "What's in Osun?"

"Who," she corrects. "A new crewmate, I hope. I asked the Illusive Man for some heavy hitters, front-line types, and lo and behold, he had a couple of names ready and waiting." She tilts her head, mugging confusion. "Do you think he's holding out on me?"

"Maybe he doesn't trust you, Shepard. You ever think of that?"

"Not trust little old _moi?_ I think I'm insulted. I'm the most reliable person I know."

"With your friends, Shep, that’s kinda setting a low bar.”

"You know you're just insulting yourself with that joke, right?"

"Spectre lesson number one: sometimes the hit is worth the collateral damage."

She yawns and scrubs her hand over the side of her face. "Ugh. Why do I come to you for reassurance, anyway?"

Garrus sights down the barrel, rubs away a burr. "It's a mystery."

" _Anyway,_ we're set to rendezvous with the _Purgatory_ tomorrow at... six, apparently, for a hopefully crisis-free pickup. Should be a simple custody transfer, but hell."

"You and your luck," he agrees. "Makes sense. Why Goto, though? Not that I don't think she's capable, she obviously is, but she doesn't seem the obvious choice for a pickup mission."

" _Purgatory's_ a prison ship," Shepard explains. "Run by a barefaced scumbag with delusions of grandeur who likes to sell his prisoners on the side. I don't trust him farther than I can throw him _without_ my biotics, so-"

"A thief who's good at getting in and out of lockdowns," he finishes.

"Exactly."

He shakes his head and starts snapping his rifle back together. "Shepard, you always take me to the nicest places."

"It's because I care."

###### 

Their time on _Purgatory_ almost comes to an abrupt end less than five minutes out of the airlock, when Shepard damn near comes to blows with the security guard who wants her to hand over her weapons. Well, he wants all of them to hand over their weapons, but Shepard starts protesting before Garrus even gets a chance to open his mouth, and after a quick glance at Massani they mutually decide that she's got this one. Instead Garrus triggers the program that keys up his overload hack without visibly activating his omni-tool, ready to blow the guard's shields if Shepard decides to escalate the issue. He wouldn't put it past her: she's already annoyed enough about having to deal with Kuril, and it wouldn't take much for her to decide that shooting their way out is the best way to go.

"Stand down," a harsh turian voice barks, and a man who's obviously Warden Kuril himself comes hustling down the stairs to the loading dock. Garrus gets a look at his face and wants to laugh. How much of a cliche can one man be? "Put your weapon away, soldier."

"But sir, she wouldn't relinquish-"

"That's an order," Kuril says, and when the guard reluctantly holsters his pistol, Kuril turns to Shepard with a kindly and paternalistic smile that is damn near guaranteed to send her through the stratosphere. "Commander Shepard, it's good to finally meet you. I've heard a lot about you."

"Warden," Shepard says. The space where the rest of the pleasantries should be hangs heavy in the air between them, and Kuril's jaw tightens just a fraction at the insult.

"Welcome to the _Purgatory,_ Commander. I understand your concerns, but you really do need to relinquish your weapons before you proceed out of the docking bay. It's a matter of security. You understand."

"I understand that I'm not giving up my weapons," Shepard says. Her voice is flat, not even a hint of her usual jocularity, and Garrus's hands tighten involuntarily on his rifle. She's angry, not some display of temper to make a scene and keep her weapons but _actually angry,_ in a way she rarely ever is. "The Council is the only authority that has the right to make that request, and even that I would consider optional. It's not happening."

Kuril's jaw tightens another notch, but after a brief staring contest he nods in acquiescence. "Very well. I'll ask that you please stay away from the exercise yard, then. We don't want to risk a riot on the part of the prisoners."

"I think I can manage that," Shepard says, and holsters her pistol. Garrus folds and slides away his rifle, but he notices that Massani doesn't do the same. Smart, cautious bastard, or maybe just resentful- he's eyeing the Blue Suns logo on the nearby uniforms with disfavor. Kasumi never even drew her pistol, and is slouched against a wall behind Massani, grinning like she has a secret.

Kuril turns to lead them away, and starts expounding on the nature of the prison ship, the good work they do there, et cetera, et cetera. Shepard follows him so the rest do too, and Garrus leans down to murmur in her ear, "You could have warned me, you know."

"About what?"

About how much she obviously hates Kuril, for starters, and how she was damn near looking for an excuse to start shooting back there. But he settles for, "I thought you meant barefaced as an insult."

"I did," she says. "It also happens to be true. I'm not sure if he was born outside and never served, or-"

"Dishonorable discharge," Garrus says, as Kuril rambles on about their tight security. "Did you see the texturing on his hide? It gets that way when you burn off the markings with acid. Which is what happens to soldiers who get court-martialed and convicted."

"Harsh punishment."

" _Unofficial_ punishment. The former squad members usually take care of it."

"See, I knew there's a reason I liked your people."

They reach the end of the hallway and Kuril comes to a stop, gesturing towards the row of cells ahead of him. "We do good work here, Commander. I'm glad you were willing to do business."

"I'm all about business," Shepard says, with a smile that shows her teeth. Garrus braces himself and out of the corner of his eye, he sees Massani's hands tighten on his rifle. "But frankly, Warden... may I be frank?"

Kuril seems to know that this is a trap, but courtesy holds him fast, so he nods stiffly. "Of course."

"Speaking frankly, you're just a slaver with delusions of importance, and I'm not interested in hearing what you tell yourself so that you can sleep at night. I'm here for Jack, and if I were you, I'd finish up our transaction and get me off this ship before I remember what I used to do to slavers. Are we clear?"

It's an awe-inspiring smackdown, even by Shepard standards, and Garrus admires the steady, flat way that she delivers it even as he watches Kuril's teeth grind in pure, unadulterated rage. In that moment, he's fairly certain that if the good warden were armed, Shepard would be picking bullets out of her armor right now.

"Warden?" she prompts, when Kuril doesn't respond. A small growl rumbles up in his chest, almost inaudible to human ears, but he grits out, "Understood, Commander."

"Good."

Kuril jerks his chin down the hall. "Outprocessing is that way. I'll give the order to get Jack out of cryo and meet you there to finish up."

He stalks off before she can respond, and Shepard turns to Garrus, suddenly all smiles once more. "He seemed grumpy. Do you think it was something I said?"

Garrus can only stand there and marvel at the sheer breathless weirdness that is Shepard, but Massani is somewhat less sanguine. "You are goddamn insane," he growls, and Shepard nods, almost happily.

"Yep. Now you're gettin' it."

Garrus just shakes his head. "You mind telling me what the hell crawled up your ass about that one?"

"Do you know how the good Warden got the funds to start this operation?” she says. “Because I do. He picked up the pirates that escaped after the Blitz and escorted them back out of Alliance space for the Hegemony bounty. _Including_ Elanos Haliat, the man who planned the entire thing.”

Garrus winces. He remembers how that turned out.

"So really, if you think about it, I'm being very polite," Shepard continues. Her smile is very, very bright - all the better to display her teeth, of course. "All things considered."

"All things considered," Garrus says with a sigh. "Maybe let's try to wrap things up and get out before you start a shootout, huh?"

"Knock on wood, asshole," she tells him, and then heads off to outprocessing before he can ask her what that means.

###### 

"Explain about the knocking on wood," Garrus asks, about an hour later.

Shepard glares at him across the wall of flame that separates them and smacks down a pair of encroaching guards with her biotics, finishing them off with two quick blasts from her shotgun. "Now? We're having this conversation now?"

"Why, you got something better to do?"

"Turians are really easy to choke, did you know that?" she says, but her next shot goes over his shoulder, taking out a guard that was trying to creep up behind him. "It's a superstition, okay? When you say something that seems like it's inviting trouble, you knock on wood to keep it from happening."

"Not a lot of wood on a ship."

"You noticed that, huh?"

"You trying to say I jinxed us, Shepard?"

"If the shoe fits."

"Are you always goddamn like this?" Massani yells from across the way. "Do you ever fucking shut up?"

"Pretty much no," Shepard admits, and then takes a breath and _charges_ across the wall of flame, a blue-lit blur of armor and biotics. She arrives at Garrus's side a moment later and grins up at him. "Hi."

He manages to get his mandible up off the floor. "Shepard, you are just full of surprises."

"It's the best way to be, really." She jerks her chin up at the stack of crates they're using as cover. "Speedball?"

"Aw, you remembered," he says, and braces himself, elbows tight to his body, as Shepard picks him up with her biotics and throws him up on top of the crates. He stumbles a little on the landing - it's been two years since he's had to pull that off, he thinks he can be excused - and then primes his visor and does one long three-sixty sweep of their surroundings, his shields whining in distress a the sudden hail of gunfire that comes his way. "Okay, down!" he calls, and steps back into space, only to be caught once more by Shepard's biotics before she eases him back down to the ground.

"Get a good look?"

"Look who you're talking to, Shepard. I think I'm insulted." But even as he speaks he's keying his omni-tool and sending the data to the rest of the team. Shepard pulls it up on the HUD in her own visor, Massani's arm glows orange as he views it on his omni-tool, and Goto is nowhere to be found but presumably does the same. "He's using his prisoner containment fields as shields. Those are hard to break."

Goto's musical laugh floats through their comms. "Lucky you brought someone who's good at breaking into things, isn't it?"

Shepard leans up out of cover, fires off another round of shots, and ducks back down. "See, I knew we had you along for a reason. Kasumi, you're going to take out those shields. Zaeed, covering fire. Garrus, take out those heavies roaming around; I'm getting damn tired of rockets coming at my face."

"Tell me about it," he says, and earns a quick, rueful smile.

"What are you gonna do, Shepard?" Massani says, and Shepard rolls her neck from side to side, pulls out the grenade launcher strapped to her back.

"I think I'm going to go say hello to the Warden."

###### 

Because it's that kind of day, things almost come to blows _again_ in the docking bay. It turns out that Jack has a bit of a bone to pick with Cerberus, and doesn't take kindly to the idea of leaving on their ship. Garrus can't exactly blame her, but neither does he want to stand around arguing while _Purgatory_ burns around them.

"Maybe we should tie 'er up and take her with us," Massani says, and it's frustration more than anything, but Jack still bares her teeth and spits curses, biotic energy flickering restlessly at her palms.

"Fuck you! I'd like to see you fucking try!"

"All right, _enough,"_ Shepard says, and shoves between them. "Jack. There is no way off this goddamn station unless you come with us, you understand? You stay here, you're at the mercy of the other inmates-"

Jack turns her head and spits on the floor.

"-or of the Alliance, when they come by in a week or so to clean up this mess," Shepard continues, undeterred. "The ship's currently in their territory, after all. Or maybe they'll hand it off to the turians, let the Hierarchy clean up the mess. You want to get caught in that kind of clusterfuck?"

"I sure as shit don't want to get caught by Cerberus!"

"I'm not Cerberus," Shepard says, and when Jack turns, shoves an accusing finger at the Cerberus logo on the _Normandy,_ Shepard gets right up in her face and slaps her hand over her shoulder. " _I'm not Cerberus._ Look at my goddamn face, tough guy. Everyone with a working vidscreen knows my face.”

Jack peers at her, a little reluctantly, and then her eyes wide with surprise. “Shepard’s dead,” she says, after a moment, but she sounds a lot less certain now.

“I got better,” Shepard says. “It’s a long story, but I’m back. And you know me, you know my rep. I don’t leave people behind.”

“Not even when they’re being idiots for no good reason,” Garrus puts in. Jack wrenches her head around to stare at him; he can see recognition flare in her dark eyes. “Just sayin’.”

Shepard folds her arms over her chest. "You want to get left behind, Jack?"

"Fuck," Jack says, and Garrus doesn't miss the way her gaze goes over their shoulders, the way she takes in the fire and the screaming and the riot that threatens to boil up behind them. "Fuck! Okay! Get me out of here!"

"That's what I like to hear," Shepard says, and lifts a hand to her ear. "Joker, get ready to move, we've got our package and we're coming in hot."

"Yeah, that explains the explosions," Joker says, and there's a click. "Airlock is open, _Normandy_ clear to depart in forty seconds. Better hustle, you've got a lot of movement on your tail."

"Roger that," Shepard says, and then, "All right, you heard him, let's move!"

They go skidding through the airlock at thirty-seven seconds and counting, and the _Normandy's_ engines kick in about four seconds after that. He and Shepard both throw themselves into the same corner and brace each other while Kasumi grabs onto the doorway, but Massani lands on his ass when the ship abruptly accelerates under them. Jack stays on her feet through sheer stubbornness, apparently, and then there's the inner-skull vibration of relay travel and the _Normandy_ calms once more.

Garrus peels himself up out of the corner, gives a scowling Massani a hand up, and then sends his very driest look back at Shepard. "The next time you want to spend some quality time together? Let's get that drink."

###### 

In a surprisingly merciful turn for Shepard, she gives everyone a few days to recover after the mission, drifting around the system and scanning every chunk of rock she can get her hands on. Giving people a chance to get their balance, he knows. Ever since she came on board, she’s been on the move, and mostly to places that Cerberus staff don’t feel particularly welcome _or_ comfortable. Out here in the black, Shepard makes the rounds, gets to know names, faces, lets the crew get used to her as a commander instead of a legend. And, Garrus knows, makes sure to take their measure a lot more thoroughly in return while she’s doing it.

"So how's our little biotic powder keg settling in on the _Normandy?_ " he asks her, on the third day.

Shepard grins up at him from his bedroll down the steps; by now he's pretty much resigned himself to her coming into the gunnery and making herself comfortable in his sleeping nest. _If I tried to stop her,_ he reasons, _she'd just do it more._ "I'm fine, thank you for asking."

"Don't kid yourself, Shepard. You're good, but you're not _that_ good."

“Rude,” she chides lazily, but not like she particularly minds. “Jack’s doing fine. She got her reports on Cerberus - carefully scrubbed, I’m sure, of anything Miranda actually cares about - and she’s happily plotting death and dismemberment in the cargo hold. She’ll be fine.”

He snorts. “You seem pretty comfortable with the plotting part.”

“Eh. It won’t come to anything.”

“You sound pretty sure about that.”

“I know her,” Shepard says easily. “I know her type. Angry, mouthy, chip on her shoulder a mile wide, kicking at the world so it won’t kick at her first… Trust me, I’ve been there. It won’t turn into anything. People who cause problems, _real_ problems, they don’t wear it in the open like that. They bury it deep.”

It’s one of the most emotionally revealing things she’s ever said to him, and it leaves him reeling, fumbling for a punchline that he’s sure she expects him to deliver. “So what you’re saying is that you used to have a bunch of tattoos?”

“Used to _bullshit_ , what kind of marine doesn’t have ink?” She waves her hand airily. “Miranda was nice enough to give ‘em back to me when she rebuilt me, even. Real thoughtful of her.”

_This_ is news. Then again, he's never seen any of her skin below the collarbone or above the elbow. She could be as covered as Jack under her uniform and he’d never know. "Well, she’s the detail-oriented type.”

“That she is. And weirdly accepting of some of the not-Cerberus-approved parts of our battle plan, considering the source. Actually, there’s surprisingly few xenophobes on the crew in general. I was expecting to break out the hand puppets and do the _friendship is magic!_ speech, but people have been very accommodating.” She squints up at him. “ _Suspiciously_ accommodating, even. You think maybe they’re just biding their time?”

“I think you’re paranoid,” Garrus tells her. Looks at her sideways. “And coming from _me…_ ”

“I know, I know. Say, when’d you get this alarming new streak of self-awareness? I’m not sure I like it.”

He thinks back to the thick, copper-seaweed smell of mixed blood on the floor, blue and red and orange, seeping into a tacky sludge on the metal floor, bone and bits of brain matter mixed in. Thinks, too, of Liara pressing a metal chain into his hand, a small flat piece of rubber-rimmed durasteel suspended from it, his thumb rubbing over the letters engraved on the side: _E-P-A-R…_

In the present, Shepard’s looking up at him, the thin skin around her eyes crinkled up with a smile, waiting for him feed her the next punchline. He forces himself to smile. “Everyone’s got to grow up sometimes, right, Shep?”

“Not me,” she says promptly. “I refuse.”

The second smile comes a little easier. “That’s what I admire most about you, Shepard. Your graceful attitude.” She sticks her tongue out at him, which he’s had occasion to learn _isn’t_ the lewd invitation it would be from a turian. That was a fun cross-cultural mishap the first time someone broke that one out. “Yeah, real mature.”

Garrus watches her out of the corner of her eye as she goes back to her report, pages over to the next report with a flick of her thumb against the datapad’s screen. She could run it on her omni-tool, he knows, but Shepard’s always liked the weight of something solid in her hand, whether it’s a gun or a computer. Her biotics are probably about as much intangibility as she can handle, and even then she’s always had a bad habit of using them more or less just to punch things more effectively in the face. Occasionally with _her_ face.

Come to think of it, it’s probably not a surprise that the fancy new amp Cerberus gave her isn’t exactly designed according to standard Alliance spec. Shepard’s never been good at the turian shielding techniques they teach in the Alliance; she's always been a lot better at krogan force mechanics. That charge she did the other day was straight out a battlemaster’s playbook. Wrex would be so proud.

“Look at this guy,” Shepard says, stabbing her finger at the screen. “Colony brat, from the far edge of the Traverse. His grandfather served in the First Contact War and he lost his aunt to the geth but I talked to him yesterday and it’s all ‘I’m honored to be on this mission, Commander’ and ‘I think diversity is important, Commander.’ And I have a very fine-tuned bullshit sensor- Shut up,” she says, before he can even open his mouth. “Don’t say it- I have a lot of experience with people trying to bullshit me, okay, and I’m tellin’ you, big guy, this kid was sincere as all get-out. It’s honestly a little painful.”

Garrus squints at her. “Are you… complaining because your crew isn’t speciesist… enough? Why, Shepard. I think I’m hurt.”

“Fuck you, I’m a model of interspecies diplomacy and you know it.”

“Your ability to find the one alien at the bar who’s curious enough to try fucking a human is impressive, but it doesn’t quite count as diplomacy, Shep.”

“I have opened minds and broadened horizons, Vakarian.” She gives him a filthy grin. “Among other things.”

“Yeah, I’ve seen you on shore leave.” Work hard, play hard, that’s Shepard’s motto. He wonders if she picked up someone in Afterlife. She had the time, waiting for Dr. Solus to pack up his gear. And it's not like she'd have to try particularly hard. He’s always envied that about her - not the supposed sexual prowess, he does just fine on his own there, thanks - but her knack of talking to people, the way she makes it look effortless. Shepard's more cunning than clever and she's only ever charming on accident, but she's got a brute-force charisma to her, a smile that makes you feel like the only person in the room. There’s a reason all of his lovers tend to be friends, and a reason all of his friends tend to be people he’s worked with: small talk is not exactly his forte. Not that it's Shepard's, either - but Shepard, as he's had occasion to witness, doesn't usually need it.

“Seriously though,” she says, after a minute. “Do you think maybe they’re plotting something?”

“Or maybe,” he says, not looking away from his screen, “the Illusive Man was just smart enough to stack the deck with people he knew you couldn’t find fault with.”

“...Shit. You’re right.” She drums her fingers on bulkhead, then brightens. “Or people who pretend well enough, at least. He can’t know everything.” She sounds tremendously cheerful about the prospect. “Hell, he didn’t even know Archangel was you, when he sent me after him.”

“Mmm.” Garrus has his doubts about that, privately, but he’ll let it rest. It’s not like getting her _more_ worked up about the Illusive Man’s manipulations is going to help anything. “No psych screening is perfect, true.”

She grins at him. “Nobody’d let you go anywhere, if that’s the case.”

“You know, if you just came here to insult me, you do have a cabin of your own. I’ve seen it. It’s nice.”

“I didn’t _just_ come here to insult you. That’s a side benefit.” She sets down her tablet and squints up at him. “You’d tell me if you were having problems with anyone, right?”

He blinks at the question, then stops his work to turn to face her fully. “Yeah, Shep, I’d let you know.” _If I couldn’t handle it myself, anyway,_ he amends privately. “But I honestly haven’t been having any problems. Some of them are a little… twitchy, sure, but I’m probably the first turian a lot of them have ever seen any closer than a vidscreen. It’s to be expected.”

Her eyes go soft when she smiles. “Can’t figure why. It’s not like you’re scary.”

The first day he and Shepard met, he killed three men and almost crushed another’s windpipe, holding him up off the ground by his throat while interrogating his comrade. Shepard just watched him then like she does now, her perpetual faint smile tugging at the corners of her mouth, as unconcerned as if they were sharing a drink in the cafe. Shepard doesn’t have the goddamn sense to know when she’s supposed to be afraid.

“Yeah, I’m a regular, whaddaya call ‘em, teddy bear,” he says, and listens to the low, slightly rough sound of her laugh.

At least he still has this. Even if there's nothing else left, it's enough.


	4. Chapter 4

Shepard takes a brief detour before setting off after the last of the Illusive Man’s dossiers, out to a nearby system to hit an Eclipse stronghold. Apparently there’s an eezo smuggling operation going on down on the surface, the location of which Shepard got from Aria as payment for some complication favor with a krogan and a mercenary plot.

(“When do you even have time for this shit?” Garrus asks her, on the shuttle ride down.

“Can I help it if people just naturally want me to succeed?” she replies, then ducks when he throws a spare heat sink at her head.)

Garrus is just there as backup for this one, mostly; Shepard’s a lot more interested in getting Jack’s measure than she is with some piddly eezo shipment. Shipside isn’t the safest place to practice biotics; you never know when someone might get overenthusiastic and puncture the hull. And “enthusiastic” is the least of Jack’s problems.

“What do you think?” Shepard says afterwards, when they’re back on the ship and Jack’s gone skulking back to the cargo hold. “You think she’ll hold up in the field?”

“Why are you asking me, Shep? I thought you had her all figured out already.” This time, he’s the one ducking, when she swipes lazily at the back of his head. “You’re so violent.”

“Remember that,” she threatens, but she sighs, leans against the railing next to him. “You had a better view on her performance than I did. I was too busy trying not to get squished.”

“Did you ever consider _not_ getting underneath the giant mech with the rocket launcher on its arm? Just curious.”

“Yeah, but where’s the fun in that?”

Heart attack. She’s going to give him a heart attack one day, and then she’ll be sorry. “She’s powerful, but we already knew that,” Garrus says, silently letting her win that one. It’s not like she’s going to change at this late date, anyway. “She doesn’t have much in the way of endurance, though. She blew her entire load on that first mech and left you to clean up the rest. You’ll need to work on that. Good aim, though, and she’s familiar with heavy weapons. Reckless, but she had less problems following your lead than I would have thought.” He shrugs. “Needs some practice, but if you want my guess, she’ll hold up. Why?”

“Thinking about breaking her in on Korlus.”

“Korlus?” It’s been years since he’s been there, and he doubts it’s gotten better in the meantime. “Who the hell is on Korlus?”

“Some warlord playing at scientist, holed up there doing experiments on the Blue Suns’ dime,” Shepard says. “Apparently _krogan_ is next on the Illusive Man’s interspecies sampler menu of trained killers.”

Huh. “So you’re thinking Jack?”

“Yeah. I need a fourth, but I could take Jacob instead.”

Garrus squints at her. “Who’s the third?”

“Zaeed.”

“You payin’ extra for that?”

“Nah, he’s getting a flat rate. He loves hitting the Blue Suns, though. Apparently he’s got a grudge. Could give us an edge if the going gets rough.”

“True.” Garrus taps his claws on the console, _one-two-three, one-two-three._ “Jack,” he says finally. “Taylor doesn’t get on with Massani; he thinks mercs are scum and he’s not subtle enough to keep it quiet. They posture too much when they’re both around you. Jack won’t put his back up, and she’ll respect a merc with his rep. You’ll need to keep an eye on them, though. They’re not used to working in formation.”

She grins up at him. “And that’s why I was planning on making Zaeed your problem for the op.”

Walked right into that one, didn’t he? “I’m surprised you want a turian tagging along,” he says, instead of answering. He can handle Massani, Shepard knows that. And Jack’s still raw enough that she needs a commander of Shepard’s calibre to keep her in line. “I don’t know if you’ve noticed this, but we’re kind of not the krogan’s favorite people.”

"Never stopped you from picking at Wrex back in the old days," Shepard points out absently, poking at the hole in his collar. "Damn, Vakarian, are you ever going to get this thing patched? Is this some kind of self-flagellation thing?"

He bats her hand away irritably. "Leave it, Shep. The seals are fine."

"Oh my god, you're stubborn. You know we can afford a new hardsuit, right?"

"You're the one who was bitching about paying the bills." He ducks away when she tries to tug on the jagged leading edge over his shoulder. "Are you trying to make it worse? I said leave it."

"Fine, Mr. Grumpy Pants." She steps back and folds her hands demurely behind her back, her face fixed with an expression of innocence he doesn't believe for a second. "And yeah, it's fine. First, because I'm pretty sure that whatever the Illusive Man is offering him is too good to pass up for a little interspecies prejudice, and second, because if it _is_ going to be a problem, I'd rather know up front. Word is that he's a scientist, anyway, he won't be in the field with us. You won't have to deal with him much." He gives her a speaking look. "What?"

"You do realize that means he'll be sharing a lab with Dr. Solus, right?"

"I have," she says, with a grin so satisfied it's almost post-coital. "And you know what? Interpersonal problems between crew members are the responsibility of the XO."

Someday he's going to find out what Miranda did to piss her off, besides the obvious conflict of personality. Right now, though, he just cocks a brow at Shepard and says, with a tinge of admiration he can't quite hide, "You're kind of evil."

She preens. "And don't you forget it."

###### 

Korlus is, and this is speaking generously, pretty much the armpit of the galaxy. Garrus has been here a couple of times hunting down fugitives, and it doesn't exactly get any friendlier with repeated exposure. At least he isn't as badly affected by the heat as his human squadmates; Jack looks like she's regretting her lack of attire, and even Massani, with cooling units in his armor, is starting to break a sweat.

“Who the fuck,” Jack says, over his earpiece, “would choose to live _here?_ ”

Beside him, Massani shifts, unhappy to be sitting still when they could be getting it over with. “Pretty much nobody,” he growls. “Y’only end up here if you’ve got nowhere else to go.”

“Or if you’re making a quick buck off the locals,” Shepard says cheerfully. Out of all of them, she looks the least affected, but then Shepard is the one with a dozen-odd sets of privately-funded Cerberus armor to choose from, so she’s the only one sitting comfy in a full-on climate-controlled hardsuit. “Capitalism is a hell of a motivating factor.”

“No amount of credits is worth this heat,” Jack shoots back. “Shepard, c’mon, what’re we waiting for?”

“Directions,” Shepard says. “Too many ships means too much white noise on the radar; our scans couldn’t penetrate. But we caught movement from the shuttle, which means that if we just wait long enough…”

Above them, the loudspeaker crackles to life. “Take out those krogan!” a strained female voice screams into the silent ruins. “Prove to me that you’re worthy to fight for glory in the Blue Suns!”

“...someone will give us a hint,” Shepard finishes, and straightens away from the wall. “I think that sounds like a good start, don’t you?”

The first few squads are easy enough to take out; with him and Massani on the high ground, Shepard and Jack don’t even get much of a chance to get in on the action, much to Jack’s vocal disapproval. As they get closer to the center, though, the merc captain gets wise to the fact that there’s more than just krogan on her flank, and starts putting some serious muscle in their way.

Jedore, they learn on the way; the captain’s name is Jedore. By the end of the first hour, Garrus is pretty sure he hates her. She keeps screaming about “the glory of the Blue Suns” and “earning your place at our side” over the loudspeaker, and her grating, blown-out yell would be reason enough to hold a grudge even if she didn’t also sound like the worst kind of fanatic. Who treats a merc company like a doomsday cult, anyway? It’s a good way to get fanatical loyalty and fuck-all in the way of trained combat operatives. Garrus doesn’t think much of the Blue Suns on the best of days, but at least they’re better than _this._

“Bet her bosses’d be shittin’ eight pounds of bricks if they saw this,” Massani murmurs next to him. “Who promoted this hack?”

“Shameful,” Garrus agrees, sniping a pyro trying to creep up on Shepard’s flank. “Shameful display. On your left, by the way.”

“Got it,” Massani grunts. His rifle kicks, and another vorcha falls from the upper walkway. “Wonder how long it’s been since she checked in with the main base.”

“Too long. The Suns aren’t stupid; they’d normally never let something like this go on so long.”

“I wouldn’t be so sure of that. They’re not all like you had in Omega. That rock breeds ‘em tough.”

“If you too could be so kind as to direct your attention _at the enemy,_ ” Shepard says over comms. “We are in the middle of a firefight here.”

“Sure thing, yer ladyship.”

Garrus hides a smile by laying his cheek down along the line of his scope. “Sorry, Shepard.” And then: “Seriously, though, I’m really looking forward to killing that woman.”

“Me, too.”

They make it to the ship that the Suns are using as a base eventually, and Shepard hand-signs for them to take a break while she goes to talk to the armored krogan guarding the entrance. Garrus keeps a wary eye on her, rifle to his shoulder in case he needs to shoot, but the krogan seems surprisingly peaceable, considering how loudly the captain’s been shouting about killing everything that moves. Then again, the poor bastard might be happy to see anyone that’s not in Suns armor right about now. Garrus would be grateful for a friendly face, too, if a bunch of mercs were using him as target practice.

Jack slumps down to the ground next to him, panting slightly, and Garrus peers down at her. “We’re not done yet, you know.”

“F’k off,” she mutters. She lets her head loll back against the relative coolness of the bulkhead, eyes closed. “I feel like I pulled a muscle in my brain.”

_Endurance._ Did he call it or what? Everyone she’s worked with before has probably used her as a shock trooper, making a big splash on the front lines so the rest of the grunts could sweep in and clean up after. This kind of focused, sustained effort isn’t really her wheelhouse.

Well, no time like the present to learn. “Shep,” he calls, and when she twists to look at him, brow raised quizzically, he jerks his chin towards Jack and taps his thumb against his mouthplates. Shepard snorts, but digs into her pockets, coming up with a foil packet and tossing it to him before she turns back to the krogan. Garrus catches it, then drops it into Jack’s lap. “There. Don’t say we never got you anything.”

“The hell?” Jack mutters, peering at it. “You givin’ me an energy bar like some kid?”

_Spirits preserve me._ “Biotics run hot, asskicker,” Garrus says, keeping his voice low, a little bored. “Shepard’s not done with us yet. Eat the damn rations and you might actually be useful to us when we have to do the _real_ work.”

“Fuck you, Vakarian,” Jack says, but she tears open the ration packet with her teeth, so he’s going to call that one a win.

He looks over to see Massani giving him an amused look from his other side. “What?”

“Nothin’,” Massani says, smirking ostentatiously. “Just didn’t think the feared Archangel of Omega would be such a goddamn mother hen, is all.”

Ah, yes. Battlefield Bullshit, the one language he can speak just fine without any translator at all. “Worried I’m not looking after you, sweetheart?” Garrus drawls. “I’m sure Shep’s got something for you if you ask nice.”

“Not looking to get m’balls punched off today, thanks. She’s a lot less nice when it’s not you askin’.”

“Aww, don't worry just 'cause she likes me best. You know mom doesn’t play favorites.”

“Bullshit she doesn’t,” Massani says, smirking now. “The way I hear it-”

Garrus never gets a chance to find out what he’s heard, because Shepard comes back then, clapping her hands like a primary teacher to get their attention and grinning like a fiend. “Alright, boys and girls, we have a proper target at last,” she says, elbowing her way into the huddle. “Our nameless friend over there finally had some solid intel for us. Apparently Okeer is tank-cloning krogan, fuck knows why, and then dumping them when they fail at some mystery criteria and leaving them for the Suns to clean up.”

Garrus feels one brow plate creeping up his forehead. “And they’re paying him for the privilege?”

She points at him. “Got it in one. As you can guess, they’re getting a little frustrated with this arrangement. It’s probably good we showed up when we did, I don’t think Okeer would be here much longer, one way or another.”

Either he’d kill them or they’d kill him; if things have gotten that bad, there’s really only one way out. “Roger,” Garrus says. “We should get a move on then. We got a location for Okeer?”

Shepard points up, towards the cargo hold of the upended ship that looms over them. “Our new friend is letting us in,” she says, nodding to the krogan, who is approaching a hunk of metal in front of the walkway with a vaguely puzzled tilt to its head. “But we pretty much know that there’s going to be heavy resistance once we’re in.”

“Close quarters, too.” It’s a _kendr_ -class freighter, by the looks of it; batarians favor long, tight hallways, the better to save room for cargo. “Won’t have a lot of room to shoot.”

“Somehow, Stretch, I think you’ll manage.” She looks down at Jack. “You ready to move?”

Garrus waits for the curse-word-laden comeback, but Jack just balls up the ration packet and tosses it over her shoulder, rolls to her feet and pops her neck ostentatiously. “Just try to keep up, girl scout.”

_Only Shepard,_ Garrus thinks, amused. People always want to please Shepard; she’s got that elusive something that makes people want to live up to her expectations. In spite of the fact that she is, speaking objectively, kind of an asshole.

“Fan-fucking-tastic,” Shepard says, and looks over to him and Massani. “I don’t think we’ll have much in the way of high ground for you two, but hang back if you can, keep your eye on the long range.”

He shares a sideways smirk with Massani. “I’m on it, Shepard,” Garrus says, and pops a fresh heat sink. “We’ve got your six.”

###### 

Back on the _Normandy_ , Garrus takes shameless advantage of the fact that the crew facilities are empty at mid-shift to take a shower, uninterrupted by awkward, gawking humans. Washing away the grit and filth of Korlus is almost as satisfying as nailing Jedore with a bullet right between her crazy, sanctimonious eyes.

Only almost, though. He’d been getting pretty damned tired of listening to her speechifying, by the time they’d made it to Okeer. Shepard giving him leave to go hunting was really the only thing that made the entire clusterfuck of an op worth it.

He dries off and tosses the towel into the cleanser for sanitization, then pulls on his ship suit, setting his armor aside for later. It’ll need to be cleaned before he can wear it again, too much crap clogging up the filters, but that’s a problem for later, when he’s alone in the middle of the artificial night and needs something to keep his hands and thoughts occupied. Right now, what he needs most is _food._

He and the cook have come to a detente when it comes to his rations: namely, that since Gardner is allergic enough that Chakwas has banned him from even _thinking_ about touching anything with a Hierarchy stamp on the package, Garrus is allowed, under protest, to reheat his own food in the mess if he makes it fast. Garrus offered to wire up a spare heating unit in the gunnery, but apparently _that_ was an insult even worse than the intrusion, so Garrus makes an effort to hurry, painfully aware of the limited space behind the counter and the steady, unhappy gaze of the Mess Sergeant fixed on the side of his face.

Thankfully, for a given value of ‘thankfully,’ he still mostly only has field rations, which aren’t really known for their precision cooking techniques. He has the package hot and ready to eat in a matter of minutes and withdraws as smoothly as possible, intending to take his meal back to the gunnery to eat in peace. In his experience even very tolerant humans don’t deal well with watching turians eat; apparently the teeth are fine in theory but considerably less acceptable when they’re tearing into a chunk of meat.

“Just a minute,” Gardner says, and Garrus freezes, caught before he can complete his escape. They’ve made it this far without talking, why complicate the process?

“What do you need?”

“Have you seen the Commander since you returned from your mission?”

Gardner knows damn well he hasn’t; he came straight up to the crew deck and hasn’t left since, which means he’s not asking so much as _telling_ Garrus that he needs to go find her. “No, Sergeant, I have not,” he sighs, and bids a wistful farewell to his peaceable supper. “I’m guessing she hasn’t come up for a meal yet?”

Gardner shifts, uncomfortable. At having to talk to a turian, maybe - but the crew have been relaxing around him recently, as he starts to become a more familiar face. More likely, he’s just trying to figure out the right method of address. Nobody’s been bold enough to try and slap a human title on him yet, but as the gunnery officer he’s technically fourth in rank on the crew - after Lawson and Chakwas, but before Taylor and Joker. Of course, given his position as Spectre he’s _also_ Shepard’s equal in rank, which makes for an uneasy place in the chain of command.

If he were a better turian, the informality of it would make his plates itch: turians take military hierarchy _very seriously._ But he’s always been a lot more lax than his ancestors demand, and as it is he mostly just finds it amusing. He and Shepard don’t have any problems with command on the field or off it; everyone else will get used to it, in time.

“No, sir, she hasn’t,” Gardner says, after a moment, with the air of a man finding something safe enough. Garrus bites back a smile. “And you know the doc’s orders.”

Garrus most certainly does, since they’ve been in place since long before the SR-2 was built. Biotics run hot, as he so recently reminded Jack, which means they burn calories at an absolutely absurd rate. Humans have more leeway than most species when it comes to caloric consumption, since their biology is designed for a certain amount of self-cannibalization in cases of extreme deprivation, but they still have to get the nutrients from somewhere. Chakwas has standing orders that Shepard - or any biotic operative, really, but Shepard’s the only one who tends to ‘forget’ - has to eat _something_ within two hours of any combat operation, or they’ll be confined to medbay for intravenous supplements. They’re coming up on an hour and a half now.

“Get a tray ready,” he sighs, and pops open the seal on his ration packet. He’ll have to eat fast; thankfully, the mess is all but deserted at this hour. “I’ll take it to her.”

Easier said than done, as it turns out; she’s not in any of the usual Shepard-places, like the armory or the CIC. She’s not in the cockpit, harassing Joker, and she’s not in the engine room, charming the bright-eyed young pair that stink of hormones and engine grease. Which means she’s either down in the cargo hold, bothering Jack, or-

“Y’look like a damned waiter,” Massani says, halfway out of the elevator. “That for me, precious?”

“In your dreams, cupcake.” He peers over Massani’s shoulder, but the elevator remains stubbornly empty. “You seen Shepard? She skipped postop refuel.”

“Didn’t get much chance,” Massani says, rolling his eyes. “Princess got her claws in and didn’t let go. Surprised you didn’t hear the shouting.” He jerks his thumb at the portside spare cargo hold. “They’re in there, arguing over the souvenir we picked up.”

He should have realized. Cerberus probably started salivating the second they heard about a genetically-engineered krogan, especially one created with Collector technology. “Thanks,” he says, and girds himself for battle.

“-don’t believe you understand the potential ramifications for this kind of discovery,” Lawson is saying, when he hits the control panel with his elbow and edges sideways through the doors. “Krogan scientific methods are almost completely unknown outside of their own planet, and-”

“You’re starting to repeat yourself, Miranda,” Shepard says. She sounds tired, and looks it, too, when he comes around the stack of crates and into view. It was a long, grueling op out there today, even by their standards. She didn’t need this crap on top of everything else. “I haven’t decided what I’m doing yet but I know I’m not just going to hand him over to get sliced up like some kind of- hey, Stretch,” she says, lighting up with a smile when she sees him. “You’re just in time, and with food, too! Just what the doctor ordered.”

“Literally,” Garrus says, setting the tray down on a nearby stack of crates. “You’re about fifteen minutes away from a visit to the medbay. And you know Chakwas doesn’t fool around when it comes to that rule.”

“That she does not,” Shepard says. She turns and pins Lawson with an imperious eyebrow. “Are we done for now? I’m happy to come up to your office and argue some more later if you want, but you heard the man. I need food.”

Lawson looks briefly disconcerted, like she didn’t realize how long it had been, maybe. Or probably because she doesn’t know how to feel about Shepard’s less-than-subtle command. Either way, it amuses Garrus a little to see it. It’s always satisfying seeing Shepard _happen_ to people; it’s reassuring to know he’s not the only one she can get to dance to her tune.

“Of course, Commander,” Lawson says, only a little brusquely. “I’ll leave you to it.” She nods politely to Garrus on her way out the door. “Agent.”

“Ma’am,” he says, biting back a smile. The door hisses shut behind her, and he looks over at Shepard, mandibles flared in amusement. “I’m starting to understand why you keep hiding in my gunnery, if this is what happens when you dare to show your face.”

An expression crosses Shepard’s face, so fast he almost doesn’t catch it: rueful, a little bittersweet. Then she shakes it away and the smile comes back, sure as the sunrise. “My hero,” she murmurs, and leans up on her toes to peer at the tray Gardner prepared for her. It’s not quite as hot as fresh, after his trek around the ship trying to find her, but it’s still steaming faintly, and even to his nose it smells pleasantly of the asari-style spices she favors. “Christ, I’m famished.”

“Yeah, I bet.”

She’s still in her armor, though she’s shed her gauntlets and pauldrons, cast aside in a messy pile in the corner at some point in her ‘discussion’ with her first officer. She peels off her thin nanoweave gloves and shoves her sleeves all the way to her elbows, revealing pale skin so thin it’s almost translucent, blue veins branching like rivers. He wonders, with the distant fuzziness born of exhaustion, how soft her skin would feel if he were to run the pads of his fingers down the inside of her wrist.

He shakes the thought away. _Up past your bedtime, soldier,_ he tells himself, though it’s the middle of the afternoon, ship time. It’s been a long day for them, and he can’t keep going on willpower alone any more than a biotic can. He’s still not fully recovered from Omega, probably won’t be for weeks or months to come. Three days of shooting without food or rest is pushing it even for him, and Chakwas is a hell of a surgeon, but there’s only so much she could do to replace the flesh blasted away. He needs to be more careful about getting a decent night’s rest before an op, not letting himself lie awake, thinking about things better left alone.

Shepard picks up the fork and falls on the food like a famished varren, and Garrus leaves her to it, wanders over to the tank with his hands shoved in his pockets. The krogan inside sleeps on, uncaring of the outside world, and Garrus takes the time to study him, the way he hadn’t down on Korlus. Big bastard, even for a krogan; standing at full height he’s probably got a few inches on Garrus, who isn’t exactly short even for a turian. He doesn’t look quite like a regular krogan, either. His skull plate is shorter, rounded instead of flat, with an odd tripartite crest. His face is… rounder, maybe? Chin a little wider, nasal bridge a little shorter. And the plating is textured differently, more like shattered stone than smooth bone.

...Or maybe he’s not all that different than krogan that still live on Tuchanka, and Garrus is just being speciesist. What the hell does he know about the krogan, really? Until the _Normandy,_ he never spent too much time around them; usually he was arresting them or they were trying to kill him. It’s not like he’s an expert on their biology.

Behind him, Shepard finishes her meal with a final swallow and drops her fork back to the tray with a clatter, letting out a satisfied sigh. “Vakarian, you are a lifesaver,” she says, coming up to stand next to him. “Admiring the new hood ornament?”

“Something like that.” Her shoulder knocks carelessly against his, and he has to fight the urge to bump back. Shepard tends to escalate, and they’re both too tired to start scuffling. “You know what you’re going to do with him?”

“Nope,” Shepard says cheerfully. “I figure I don’t have to decide right now, anyway. We’ve got plenty of other stuff on our plate.”

He appreciates the _our,_ though he doubts that Cerberus quite sees it that way. “You’re not wrong there,” he says. “Did the Illusive Man have any other names on that list for you?”

“Surprisingly, no,” she says. “I can’t believe he’s at the bottom of his bag of tricks, either. Not counting us, we’ve got maybe three people on this boat that we can reliably utilize for combat ops dirtside, and that’s not going to cut it against the Collectors. I need at _least_ two full ground teams, preferably with spares.”

He runs a quick roster in his head. Him, Shepard, Massani… Goto, depending on the mission, _maybe_ Lawson. Jack held up well enough today, and Taylor’s got time in even if he’s a little too by-the-books for Shepard’s style, but she’s right. They’ve got one ground squad now, on a good day, but it’s not going to be good enough. Back on the old _Normandy_ they had Alenko to run the backup team, and seasoned Alliance soldiers to fill it, but here they don’t have that luxury.

They’re short, no two ways about it.

“I’ve still got a few names up my sleeve, if you want to go do some recruiting of your own,” he offers, and it only hurts a little to say. Of all the people he’d trust with a mission of this magnitude, Shepard’s standing next to him and the rest are ashes in Omega’s recyc, but he’d try, if she wanted him to. He’s just about the sorriest excuse of a Spectre the Council ever recruited, most days, but he’s still got some pull.

“No, I think I’ll let it play out,” she says, thoughtfully. “The Illusive Man’s almost certainly holding some in reserve, and I’d like to see who. We’re not doing much more than spinning our wheels right now, waiting for Dr. Solus to come up with his anti-Collector tech, so we have the time.”

Unspoken between them is the knowledge that the next human colony might not have the same luxury. But then, that was always going to be true. He knew as soon as Shepard gave him the rundown that they weren’t going to save the next colony, or probably even the one after that. They’re not in this to win the battle. They’re in it to win the war, and that takes time.

“And hey, if it fails, there’s always the science project, here,” he says, keeping his voice deliberately light. He nods to the tank. “Whatever else he turns out to be, you can bet that he wasn’t part of the Illusive Man’s plan.”

“No,” Shepard says. Her shoulder brushes against his again, but she’s not looking at him; she’s gazing into the tank, like the krogan holds answers to questions she doesn’t even know to ask. “He’s definitely not that.”

###### 

He finds her there the night after they get back from Horizon, sitting on a crate with a tumbler in her hand, full of a dark liquid that smells of ethanol and woodsmoke. She doesn't look up when he comes in, but he can tell she knows it's him. Probably recognized his stride on the deck plating down the hallway; humans generally walk heel-to-toe, and he's the tallest on the ship by a fair margin.

He'd know her stride, too. Knows her better than he feels comfortable admitting, especially now. After the funeral, he spent months obsessively recalling every detail, like she'd fade away if he didn't pay sufficient tribute on the inside of his own head. He tries not to think about it now; it seems too… something, now that she's back. Too much. Too disrespectful, maybe, to dwell on her loss when she's right next to him. When she's got problems of her own, and deserves better than to carry the weight of his misplaced grief along with everything else.

He doesn't say anything when he comes in, just grabs another crate and drags it over next to hers. He hops up onto it with a creak of ill-used joints and leans back against the wall, closes his eyes with a sigh.

Ice clinks against glass, and he hears Shepard roll the whiskey over her tongue for a lingering moment before she swallows, fast and graceless. "I'm thinking about opening the tank."

"Yeah?" He doesn't open his eyes. "You know Lawson's going to shit a brick."

"If that's your way of discouraging me, pal, you're way off the mark."

"Yeah. Figured." He lets his head loll sideways and cracks open his eyes just a fraction, looking at her from underneath the lids. The scars on her left cheek shine faintly in the soft glow coming from the tank's control panel, smaller than they were when she found him before but still healing. He wonders how much machinery she has stapling her together under that soft human skin. As much as he has holding his mandible together? More? "You really think the clone's going to help you out?"

"Well, I'm sure as shit not donating him to Cerberus for science." She stares broodingly into her glass for a minute. "Worst case, we knock him out and drop his ass off on Tuchanka. Wrex'll know what to do with him."

"Wrex is just as likely to shoot him as anything else."

"Maybe. But it won't be my fault then, will it?"

_Aw, Shepard,_ Garrus thinks, a little heartsick. He's no good at this stuff; she wants Liara for this, or Kaidan. Someone who can look at her all earnest and tell her it's not her fault, none of it's her fault, and smile so sweet you can't help but believe it. Or at least pretend to, which is sometimes just as good.

But Liara's away on Illium, cutting her way through the Shadow Broker's web one bloody strand at a time, and she's not half so sweet anymore, anyway. And Kaidan, well. That's part of the fucking problem, now, isn't it?

"I think you should open it," he declares. She cuts him a sideways look. "What? I think it's a good idea."

"No you don't," she says, but there's the faintest twitch of a smile at the corner of her mouth. "You think it's a terrible idea."

"Well, yeah, obviously," Garrus says, as if talking to a small child. "That's what makes it great." The twitch gets stronger. "C'mon, Shepard, you don't keep me around for my good ideas."

"Oh yeah?" She takes another sip of her drink, a little slower now, more to hide her expression than anything. Too late; he can already see the dimple flirting in the crease of her cheek. "Why do I keep you around, then?"

"My dashing good looks, obviously," he says. It takes a lot of effort to keep from turning his ruined cheek away from her warm gaze, instead cocking his head and straightening his spine into a classic recruitment-poster pose. Shepard snorts, and, encouraged, he adds, "My smoldering charm, too, of course. My impeccable aim is, of course, merely a bonus, but my flawless fashion sense-"

He cuts off, chuckling, when she shoves weakly at his shoulder. "You are so full of it, Vakarian.”

“Yes, but full of _what_ , that’s the question.”

“I can think of a few things,” she says darkly, but she’s smiling for real now, looking like herself again. Garrus doesn’t know what to do with a Shepard that isn’t smiling; it just seems wrong, fundamentally against the natural laws of the universe. Not that she’s always happy, or anything, just- It’s just wrong, is all.

“I bet you could.” Banter, for the moment, exhausted, he slouches a little further down against the wall, dares to let his shoulder brush against hers. Far from flinching away, as he still half-expects, she instead leans into him with a sigh, letting him take some of her slight weight.

They’re both out of armor, and he can feel the heat radiating off of her, leeching through the layers of fabric separating them. Humans run hotter than turians, as a rule, evolved on a planet with lower temperatures, but it’s one thing to know that and another to _feel_ it, so close to his side. She went through the cleanser before coming down here, and her hair is still very faintly damp and smells of the same institutional soap that the Alliance stocked on the first _Normandy._ It’s such a familiar smell that for a moment he half-expects Ashley to walk by, making some sarcastic comment about ‘space invaders’ and asking him if he wants a rematch on that poker game he lost.

Old memories, now; old grief. Those times are long gone, and some of the people with it, but Shepard’s still here. Shepard hasn’t gone anywhere he can’t follow. If there’s a single damn thing he can do about it, he’ll make sure that she never does again.

He hears her take a breath, like she’s going to speak, and then lets it out again, silently. He holds still and waits. If there’s one thing he’s good at, it’s waiting.

“I handled that badly, didn’t I. With Kaidan.”

“A little,” Garrus says, because he doesn’t lie to Shepard, not about things that matter. “But it’s understandable, considering the circumstances.”

“Not really sure Kaidan sees it that way.” He feels her shoulders rise and fall in a sigh. “I did try to get messages through to him, you know. I tried to explain. It’s all so easy to say when it’s written out on the screen but as soon as I tried to get the words out…”

She trails off, and he nods in understanding. He knows all too well how your words can betray you when you need it the most, your brain working a million miles an hour only to have it all fall to pieces on your stupid, graceless tongue. “All those messages are still there, Shep. He’s going to get back to Alliance space and check his inbox and feel really damn stupid about some of the shit he said down there.” He nudges his shoulder against her- gently, not enough to jostle her off of him. “You know he’s mostly just pissed about the way he found out.”

“God, you’re probably right. Like it’s my fault he was under operational silence.”

“Exactly. C’mon, you know Kaidan, he runs hot but he cools off fast. He’s not going to stay mad at you for long. You’ll probably get a message in a day or two, apologizing for losing his temper and asking if it’s too late to join up after all.”

“Yeah. I don’t know.” She ducks her chin, hiding her expression from him. “The apologies, maybe. But he meant it about Cerberus. Can’t really blame him on that one.”

“Maybe,” Garrus says, though privately he’s pretty comfortable holding some blame, if it comes to that. Kaidan was good with going rogue under Shepard’s command before, when they were trying to stop Sovereign. The attack on Horizon made it _painfully_ clear that the Reapers are involved with the Collector abductions, so why climb back up on his high horse now? Shepard deserves better from someone that Garrus knows she considers her brother in all but blood. “Time will tell. I’m just saying, it’s not the end of the world.”

“Yeah. I guess not.” She sighs again, presses her shoulder very lightly against his, and then slowly, creakily, straightens away. He immediately feels the loss of her warmth along his side, the animal instinct to lean after her and get it back, but holds himself still. “Still leaves me with the question of what to do _next._ ”

It’s not like Shepard to wonder about something like that, not like Shepard to be anything but three moves ahead. Then again, none of this conversation has been like Shepard. She’s always been the unstoppable force to his unmovable object, but if she needs a little forward momentum, well, it’s the least he can do. She’s been his bedrock often enough.

“Well, I don’t know if you’re taking suggestions, but…”

She turns to blink up at him, her head tilted quizzically to the side. It makes a single lock of her soft human hair fall across her forehead, and she brushes it back with an impatient twist of her wrist. “What?”

He nods to the tank, the krogan occupant sleeping peacefully within. “That might be a place to start.”


	5. Chapter 5

The Illusive Man sends Shepard a message the day after she breaks Grunt out of the tank, only barely saved from abject admonishment by the “do what you think is best” tacked on at the end. Shepard shows it to him, laughing, as they sit elbow-to-elbow in the briefing room, waiting for the rest of the command crew to make their way down.

“Well, I give him points for effort,” Garrus says, when he’s done. “He’s really trying to stick to his guns about this being your operation.”

“But you can tell it hurts him,” Shepard says, taking her pad back from him. “It’s got to be driving him crazy, having someone else in the driver’s seat for an op like this.”

“So says the control freak.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she says tranquilly. “I’m fine as long as everyone does exactly what I say, exactly when I- hey, Joker,” she says, when the pilot sticks his head around the door. “You’re the first one here.”

“Damn, and I was hoping to be fashionably late,” Joker grumbles, but as he takes his seat, Garrus notices that it’s exactly five minutes before the scheduled time. Chakwas enters only a few moments later, Taylor on her heels. They take their seats on the opposite side of the table, Chakwas pulling up some data on her omni-tool and Taylor sitting perfectly still, his hands folded on the table in front of him, his gaze fixed somewhere in the middle distance.

You never see punctuality like that outside of the military, Garrus thinks, amused. Civilian life just doesn’t match up.

Shepard’s starting to look almost visibly impatient by the time Lawson comes through the door a couple minutes later. If she’s startled to be the last one to the meeting, she doesn’t show it, just takes her seat at the foot of the table and sets her pad neatly onto the surface in front of her.

“Miranda, glad you could join us,” Shepard says brightly. “Okay folks, let’s get this over with. I know we all have other things to do.”

A tiny narrowing of eyes is the only signal Lawson gives of her annoyance. “Of course, Shepard,” she says calmly. “Jacob, would you like to start?”

Taylor gives a brief but thorough rundown of their armory - extremely well-stocked - and their security problems - currently nonexistent. “We’ve set up rosters for the additional training you wanted,” he says, nodding towards Shepard. “Everyone’s pretty on board with the plan. I pulled together the list of people who can serve as instructors for the rest, and I think we can fit about two sessions per week into the existing duty rotation.”

“Any pushback from the crew?”

“None so far, Commander. I’ll keep you posted if I run into any problem.”

“Do that. Okay, Doc, what’ve you got?”

“No new developments, Commander. Although we will need to keep an eye on our medi-gel supply. We’re well stocked for now, but if we’re going to be running operations in deep space for some time, I would like the option to lay out an extra supply the next time we’re at a decent-sized port.”

“I think we can handle that. Joker?”

“She’s still in the air, Commander.”

“Good job, Joker,” Shepard says, with a perfectly straight face. “Garrus?”

At the rate she’s going, this is going to be the shortest staff meeting he’s ever experienced. “I pulled down those schematics you wanted,” he says. He pulls them up on his pad, then sends them up to the holotable with a flick of his claw. “They’re going to be expensive to install, though. Thanix cannons are loosely based on Sovereign’s main gun, and they’ve got a lot of proprietary tech that we’ll have to pick up on the black market. And they’re going to take a lot of space to assemble before we can schedule the installation.”

“What do you need?”

So much for the fast meeting. “Well,” he says, and starts the rundown. Joker pretends to look bored in the background, but Garrus can see him evaluating the specs with the faintly distant expression of a man doing calculations in his head. Makes sense; the Thanix are heavy enough to throw the _Normandy’s_ weight out of true, and Joker’s going to have to do some work to get her back in balance again after they’re on.

“Mostly processed ore to start,” he finishes up, and switches to the list. “Once the casings are assembled, we can start work on the circuitry.”

“So that’s another vote for shopping,” Shepard says. “What about you, Miranda? You need anything from port?”

Lawson gives her a disdainful look. “I already know you’re taking us to Illium, Commander,” she says. Around the table, eyebrows go up. “I’ve contacted the mining companies your… _associate_ Dr. T’Soni recommended, and we’ll be ready to meet once we dock.”

“Way to ruin the surprise, Miranda.” Shepard flicks open a file on her pad. “EDI, the display?”

A holographic image flickers into life in the middle of the table: a drell in a well-fitted leather coat, his face turned away from the camera. “The Illusive Man sent us another file yesterday,” she tells the rest of the group. “This is Thane Krios. He’s an assassin, a quick-kill biotic specialist and a sniper. Which means more competition for you, big guy,” she tells him in an aside. “More competition than you already get from me, anyway.”

“Please, Shepard. You’re not competition; you’re entertainment.”

“Keep telling yourself that.” She folds her hands in front of her. “The Illusive Man has authorized us to offer Mr. Krios a competitive sum, including a bonus for breaking his current contract, if necessary. He’s slowed down somewhat in recent years, but rumor is he’s taken a contract on Illium. We’re going to see if we can’t make a better offer.”

Taylor, predictably, scowls up at the image. “A hitman? C’mon, Shepard.”

“A hitman isn’t much worse than a soldier,” Garrus says, before Shepard can answer. Taylor’s gaze snaps to him, and he shrugs, a little uncomfortable. “It just means that he’s used to killing for a contract instead of for a cause, and trust me when I say that when you get down to it, most people are a lot more loyal to their bottom line than anything else.”

“My little cynic,” Shepard says fondly, patting his wrist. “He’s got a point, Jacob. We’re asking people to sign up on a potentially one-way trip against an unknown enemy; beggars can’t exactly be choosers in this situation. Also, we need another sniper. No offense,” she tells Garrus.

“None taken,” he says, amused. “Means you get to take Massani back on the front lines.”

“Can’t win ‘em all, I guess. The decision’s already been made,” she tells the group. She’s still smiling, but there’s steel in her voice now, only barely hidden under the surface. “You’ve got concerns, feel free to air them and we’ll do our best to take them into account on the op. But we’ll be docking at Illium in less than two days, so make sure to let me know fast.”

She looks around the table. Taylor is the only one who doesn’t make eye contact; the corner of his mouth is quirked downward, like he’s not quite sure how he feels about it. “Okay then. Everyone can go back to whatever the fuck they were doing. Joker, lay in course for Illium. Let me know once it’s complete.”

“Sure thing, Commander.” Joker leverages himself to his feet and throws a sloppy salute generally at the rest of the table. “See you suckers later.”

He hobbles out of the room, and Shepard swipes her palm across her pad, wiping away Krios’s image from the holotable. “Anyone else have any questions?”

“I do,” Lawson says. Shepard manages to hold back her sigh, but he's sitting close enough that he can tell it's a near thing. “What are your plans for our newest resident?”

Shepard groans and scrubs a hand across her face. “Let it go, Miranda,” she says. “He’s already agreed to place himself under my command for the duration of this mission. After that is a problem _very much_ for another day. He’s stronger, faster, and hardier than most krogan twice his age-”

“Which includes infants,” Garrus murmurs from beside her. She glares. “Just saying.”

“Whose side are you on?” she grumbles. He shrugs, unrepentant, and she turns back to Lawson. “He’s a good soldier and Okeer’s tank program gave him a better instruction in combat operations than most krogans get. Right this moment, he is sitting down in the cargo hold running Alliance training sims so he can learn to work with us, because that is how seriously he takes this mission. Let it go.”

“I don’t think ‘suicidal enthusiasm for the biggest target he can imagine’ counts as _taking it seriously_ , Commander. And I still think it’s liable to backfire when you can least afford-”

“Let. It. Go.” Shepard’s green eyes are like flint now; no hint of the veneer of softness she’d had before. “I wasn’t willing to hand him over to Cerberus scientists when he was still in the tank, and I’m certainly not willing to do so now that he’s a person with a name and a mind of his own. He’s a member of my crew, Miranda. You’ve studied me long enough that you should damn well know what that means.”

“...Of course, Commander.” They hold eye contact for a long time, longer than Garrus would have expected after Lawson’s agreement, but then Lawson sighs and looks away, pinching the bridge of her nose. “Of course I understand. It’s just that it’s my duty to look after this _whole_ crew, and I’m concerned that Okeer’s untested training program may fail to hold at a crucial juncture, with potentially catastrophic results. I bear the krogan no ill will, Commander. Surely you understand that.”

The tick in Shepard’s jaw says _I'll believe it when I see it,_ but she nods, as polite as Shepard ever gets. “Of course,” she says. “If it helps, Grunt has agreed to contain himself to the lower decks, away from the majority of the crew. If Yeoman Chambers agrees, I can ask her to perform regular psychological evals to monitor for any instability. Would that satisfy your concerns?”

“Yes, Commander,” Lawson says, as professionally as ever, but there’s a loosening in the line of her shoulders that reads like relief. “I can speak to Chambers immediately, if you like.”

“Sure,” Shepard says, with a slight wave of her hand. “I’m sure you know how to handle it. Now, is there anything _else_ we need to address?”

Head-shakes from around the table. “Okay, folks. Senior staff is officially adjourned. Don’t forget to let people know to put in for shore leave if they’re planning on disembarking at Illium; we have enough problems without having crewmates unaccounted for. Dismissed.”

The other three scatter, but Garrus sits still, lounging back in his chair, watching Shepard close out Krios’s file on her pad. When the doors slide close behind them, Garrus says, “You’ve got to ease off her.”

Shepard gives him a sideways look, somewhere between amused and annoyed. Doesn’t like to be challenged, does his Shep. “Oh, do I?”

Well, too bad. “Yeah, Shepard, you do. It’s bad energy having an XO at odds with the commanding officer.” Worse when the commander is someone as charismatic as Shepard, not that he’s going to inflate her ego by telling her that. “She’s not someone I’d spend my shore leave with either, but you can’t deny that she’s good for the crew.”

“She’d be better if she was a little less….”

Ah. “Cerberus?”

Shepard makes a face, her nose wrinkling up in the human gesture of disgust. “Basically.”

“Well, too bad,” Garrus says mercilessly. “The _crew_ is Cerberus, even if you don’t like it. They trust her and they know how she works, which you need for your second. Hero-worship only gets you so far.”

“If you’re trying to tell me that I don’t have their loyalty yet, then I’m already painfully aware of that, thank you. I know they belong to the Illusive Man.”

Who will probably be listening to this conversation in the very near future, not that Garrus is planning to point that out anytime soon. They’ll be lucky if EDI doesn’t send the surveillance directly to Lawson herself.

“That’s not what I said,” Garrus tells her, gentler now. He knows her well enough to hear that the bitterness in her voice isn’t faked, or even exaggerated for effect. He should have realized that this would be bothering her, but who can know what goes on in Shepard’s head? “Loyalty isn’t the issue. These guys think you walk on water. I’m talking about operations.”

She blinks at him, but some of the rancor has faded from her expression, replaced by the distant look she gets when she’s working her way around the corners of a problem. “Explain.”

“I read the same Alliance reports on Cerberus that you did, remember?” And hadn’t _that_ been a fun conversation, when one of the admirals had gotten wind of the fact that she was sharing classified military information with a non-human crew member. Nevermind the fact that Garrus was a Spectre and could have requisitioned the reports himself if he’d wanted, or the fact that he was working just as hard as Shepard to hunt down the group that was using Alliance marines as test subjects. “They operate in cells, with very little contact with each other. Which means that they don’t exactly have shared procedural guidelines. Most of these guys have never been Alliance, or washed out because they didn’t like the structure, or whatever. From an operational standpoint, everyone’s going off their own playbook. Lawson’s probably the only one familiar enough with the organization as a whole to keep things running smoothly.”

Shepard drums her fingers on the table. “You’re saying I need her.”

“Maybe,” Garrus says, and then shrugs, abruptly irritated with himself. “Or maybe I don’t know what the fuck I’m talking about. Not like I’ve got the best track record when it comes to command.”

Immediately after saying it he could kick himself - _so much for not talking about it, huh, Vakarian?_ \- but the only reaction she gives is a slow blink and a thoughtful hum. “Don’t sell yourself short, big guy,” she says. Her green eyes are knowing, but the faint smile on her face tells him she’s not going to push it. Not right now, at least. “I always take your advice very seriously.”

It’s easier than he would have thought to let out a mock-aggravated sigh, to downshift back into their usual easy banter. “Do you want counterexamples in chronological order, or alphabetical?”

She cocks her head. “How would alphabetical order even work?”

“Name of the planet they occurred on, followed by day of the week.”

“Day of the week is kind of chronological, though. Isn’t that cheating?”

“You know what, Shepard?” he says, and lets himself smile back at her. “Just for you, I’ll rewrite the list.”

###### 

Illium is just as beautiful, and as deadly, as he remembers.

“Okay, kids,” Shepard says, pinning Jack with a look that keeps her from wandering off before the speech is done. “Rules of engagement. Number one, do not drink asari wine. Trust me, love yourself, don’t do it. Two, don’t buy anything without a warranty. And three, don’t leave the dockside tourist traps all marked up in trade tongue for stupid foreigners. Street patrols further out love to shake down mercs and I don’t have the credits for bribe money. Got it? Okay? Good. Get out of here, I don’t want to see your faces till shift change tomorrow.”

Jack, Kasumi, and Massani all scatter, Jack towards the nearest bar and the other two to take care of some business Garrus doesn’t want to know too much about. Lawson nods politely at Shepard and heads off to the trade stalls, datapad in hand. She’s taking care of the _Normandy’s_ prospecting contracts, leaving Shepard free to focus on the business at hand.

Garrus looks at Shepard. Shepard looks back at him.

“Liara?”

“Liara.”

The infamous Dr. T’soni has moved up in the world since he saw her last; her new office is only a few blocks off the main docking quay, overlooking the trading room floor. He sees a few security officers eyeing them as they pass, for his ruined armor or his ruined face, or maybe just for Shepard’s outsized hand cannon, but no one actually stirs themselves enough to interfere. He sends up a silent prayer of thanks that Shepard decided to make some attempt at blending in; she’s wearing a black Cerberus bodysuit instead of her armor, which means she still looks like trouble but not the kind of trouble that’s about to haul off and start shooting at any second. She tried to argue him out of his hardsuit for the sake of equality, but Cerberus didn’t exactly stock shielded infiltration skinsuits in non-human sizes, and he’s been to Illium often enough that he’s sure as shit not going dirtside in his shirtsleeves. He didn’t make it this far by getting stupid about basic personal security, and Illium only _looks_ peaceful. It’s not called the “gateway to the Terminus” for nothing.

“You know, something I’ve been wondering,” he says, as they walk.

“Hmm?”

“What’s with the armor?” he says, nodding to her skinsuit. “The hardsuit you used to wear wasn’t much heavier than that stuff. Now yours probably weighs almost as much as mine.”

“I wouldn’t go _that_ far,” she says, amused. “You’ve gone up a weight class in the last couple years, too.”

“Yeah, well.” He rolls his shoulders, feels the now-familiar heft of the stabilizer module along his spine. “It was time for an upgrade.”

There’s a moment of silence where both of them think about the way she found him, weeks ago. Then he catches the white flash of her grin out of the corner of his eye. “The ladies weren’t as impressed without me there to lend you some class, right?”

“In your _dreams,_ Shepard.” He shoves at her shoulder, just hard enough to knock her off course, and she stumbles slightly before righting herself, laughing. “I’ve met krogans with more class than you.”

“Aw, Wrex would be touched to hear you say that.” She falls back into step with him, bumping him companionably with her elbow. “It’s not that big of a deal, you know. The new polymer plate is lighter than it looks, and. Well.”

He looks over at her when she fails to finish her sentence, finds her look uncomfortably off into the distance. “Yeah?”

She fidgets, like she wants to put her hands into her pockets and doesn’t have any, then tucks her thumbs into her ammo belt. “The weight doesn’t slow me down so much anymore, is all.”

Ah.

He thinks back to the day she found him on Omega, the way she swung his rifle up to her shoulder like it weighed nothing at all. Joker told him that Cerberus had given her all kinds of fancy upgrades, but he didn’t really put two and two together with- everything else.

How would it feel, he wonders, to come back to life knowing that you’d not only been rebuilt, but rebuilt to be _better?_ Faster, stronger, harder to kill? It’s undeniably an asset in the field, but…

“Bet I could still beat you in the ring,” he says, because _I’m sorry for what they did to you_ isn’t the kind of thing they say to each other, and it’d just make her feel uncomfortable, anyway. Shepard likes to think that she’s an enigma, but he knows her better than that. “You’re scrappy, but even Cerberus can’t fix that kind of handicap.”

“ _Handicap,_ huh?” Shepard says. “As I recall, our last match ended in a draw.”

“Only ‘cause I took it easy on you.”

“Naw, I was the one taking it easy on _you._ ” Shepard’s grin comes back, easy again, a little nostalgic. “How much money did Tali win on that one, anyway?”

“I don’t know, but it was a lot. Joker was swearing around it for _weeks_ after.”

“Yeah,” Shepard says fondly. “I think he still holds a grudge. It was a good idea, though. Kept everyone distracted on the way to Ilos.”

Garrus rolls his shoulders into a shrug. “Better than endlessly polishing our rifles and contemplating court-martial. Human military does some things right, sure, but prepping for a big mission? You want to let _off_ some of that tension, not let it build.”

“Hey, no complaints from me,” Shepard says, holding up her hands. “You know, we could start the hand-to-hand back up, if you’re interested. I know Jacob could use a few more instructors for the security drills, and it would be good to get the crew used to fighting together.”

_And good to show the Cerberus crew that a human can hold their own against a turian,_ he thinks, only a little cynically. Not that most can, without biotics, at least not pound-for-pound. Shepard’s just an overachiever. “I’m a little rusty,” he warns her. “Did a lot more shooting than punching the last couple years.”

“All the better to get in some practice,” she says, with a smirk. “We can talk about it later. Hey, I think this is the place.”

He studies the discreet little holoplate next to the door. _T’Soni._ No first name listed, but then, who on Illium wouldn’t know about Matriarch Benezia’s prodigy daughter? The place where the broker’s qualifications are usually listed lies blank, which would normally be a sign that the agent doesn’t have any yet, but this close to the docks it’s just another statement of power. Like the menu at a very nice restaurant: if you have to ask, then you probably can’t afford to know.

“Looks like it,” he says, and opens the door, gestures her through. “After you.”

Liara’s assistant is more than happy to usher them into Liara’s office, with a very polite admonishment to _be quiet, please, she’s currently on a call._ Liara is standing near the big bay window, studying something on a pad, the fluid line of her spine perfectly straight in one of those over-architectured gowns the asari favor, and Garrus smiles at the familiar annoyed angle of her head before stepping back to lean against the back wall, leaving Shepard to step tentatively into the middle of the room.

“-faced an asari commando unit before? Few humans have. I’ll make it simple. Either you pay me, or I’ll flay you alive. _With my mind._ ”

_Yeah,_ Garrus thinks, watching Liara click angrily off the call. _Our little bird’s all grown up, all right._ He’s not sure how he feels about it, any more than he did a year ago when he saw her last. Is he proud of her, for so thoroughly coming into her own, taking a world just as lawless as Omega and twice as lethal and bending it to her will? Is he a little jealous that she seems to have found a place for herself, when all he’s ever been able to do is drift from one thing to the next? Is he sad for her, for the loss of near-childish innocence she’d had when they first met, that bright-burning optimism that said _evil is not a part of our hearts but a thing that happens to us just as we happen to others?_

All of those things, he thinks, as she turns to see Shepard and lights up like a supernova. But mostly happy, because it’s hard to be anything else when a friend smiles like that.

“Shepard!” she says, already rushing forward, arms outstretched. “Nyxeris, hold my calls!”

“Of course, Dr. T’soni,” the assistant murmurs, withdrawing smoothly. The doors seal behind her, and Shepard laughs in uncomplicated joy, steps into Liara’s arms and wraps the shorter woman into a rib-cracking hug.

“Shepard,” Liara sighs, and ducks her face into the curve of Shepard’s neck. Her expression is almost prayerful; he can’t see Shepard’s but he can see her grip tighten, and she relaxes almost imperceptibly, her hand smoothing up Liara’s spine to rest on the back of her neck. She rubs her jaw affectionately against Liara’s temple, and then slowly, reluctantly, peels them apart again.

“Hey, kiddo,” she says, her voice only a little rusty, and Liara hiccups a laugh, unabashedly scrubbing her hand across her watery eyes.

“I’ll have you know that I am-”

“Seventy-seven years older than me, I know, I know.”

“Seventy-nine, now,” Garrus points out. Liara’s glance snaps to him, and he waves, his mandibles flared wide with amusement. He’s not surprised she didn’t realize he was there. She didn’t have eyes for anyone but Shepard. “I don’t think it’s fair to count the missing years.”

“Bullshit,” Shepard says. Her voice smooths out, steadied by their familiar banter. “I _earned_ those two years. I deserve them.”

“If you say so, Shepard.” Liara’s hands, still on Shepard’s shoulders, smooth down the line of her arms and then drop away safely back to her side. “Seventy-seven it is, then. A lucky number.”

“Won’t argue that.”

“Well, _some_ things have changed, then.” Liara’s gently teasing expression fades when her attention drifts back to him, and he can see the exact moment when she registers the bandages, the splintered edge on the cowl of his armor. “Oh, my. Garrus. What _happened_?”

He thinks about telling her: about Omega, and his crew, and the gangs. Thinks about telling her how it all went wrong, the desperate last stand against impossible odds, Shepard’s miraculous appearance. Tarak’s gunship. The names on his visor.

He can’t even imagine it. Liara might be the sort of person who threatens death to her enemies now, but somewhere in there is the dreamy-eyed academic he used to spend hours coaching in the _Normandy_ ’s shooting range, the girl with the shy smile who’d endlessly rise to the bait of Shepard’s teasing. Spirits, he can’t even tell _Shepard,_ and he knows she’ll understand. How could he possibly say any of it to Liara, who only thought she'd seen him at his worst because she hadn’t yet seen just how low he could go?

“It’s a long story,” he says.

“He caught a rocket with his face,” Shepard says, and Garrus shoots her an annoyed look. Her eyes go wide with mock innocence. “What? You did.”

“Goddess,” Liara vows. “Well, I’m glad you’re alright.” She gives a dubious look to the bandage. “Or, healing, at least. Shepard let me know she’d found you, just not under… what circumstances.”

“ _Complicated_ circumstances,” Shepard says, grinning lazily. “Buy me a drink sometime, and I’ll tell you all about it.”

_She’s covering for me,_ Garrus realizes, and feels a rush of gratitude for her. For the way she can always read him, and always, always seems to know what he needs, even if he can’t say it out loud.

“Complicated, hmm?” Liara looks him up and down, shaking her head. “I would have thought you’d be sensible enough to stay out of trouble for one blessed year, but apparently Shepard’s been rubbing off on you.”

_She knows better than to just set up a punchline like that with Shepard around._ “Don’t say it,” Garrus order hastily, but Shepard’s already smirking.

“Don’t say what?” She bites her lip, her eyes bright with mirth. “I mean, I was just going to say that I’m clearly a good influence on you.”

“Uh-huh.”

They look over to see Liara watching them, a brow raised. “Did I miss something?”

“I’ll explain it to you when you’re older,” Shepard says, grinning. “Promise.”

“What’s that supposed to- Oh.”

Garrus snorts at the faintly scandalized expression on her face. “Well, some things haven’t changed,” he drawls. “A hundred and eight years old and you still can’t pick up on innuendo. Shepard, I think we’ve failed her.”

“Look, I did my best,” Shepard says, holding up her gloved hands in protest. “Even I can’t work miracles.”

“You’ll have to allow me to disagree,” Liara says. She steps forward, smiling faintly, and snags his dangling hands with her own. “It _is_ good to see you again, Garrus,” she tells him, with that same earnest sincerity that always made him feel about a hundred years old. “I was worried, when you fell off the grid last year. I’m glad to know that you landed on your feet.” Her smile gets a little wider, tentatively teasing. “At least until the rocket got involved, anyway.”

He smiles back at her, only a little sadly. _Oh, Liara. Even the best information broker on Illium doesn’t know everything._ “Fine and dandy,” he lies, and squeezes her hands once before letting them drop. “We’ll have to try and catch up later, if we’ve got the time.”

“I’d like that,” Liara says, and steps back. “Now. What brings you to Illium?”

###### 

They split up after leaving Liara’s office, Shepard to Liara’s contact at the cargo transfer office and Garrus to take care of some resupply. Normally it’d be Lawson’s responsibility as XO, or Shepard’s, but Lawson’s busy with the mining reps and Shepard’s a lot more useful getting intel on Krios than getting into arguments with ammo vendors. She was a lot better at sweet-talking strangers even _before_ half his face was grafted back on; even all these years later, he’s still got a bad tendency to talk to people like they’re witnesses or perps. And now, well. He’s not going to be the most reassuring face to see for a while. Maybe even ever, depending on how well his scars heal.

_Don’t think about it, Vakarian._

The separation also gives him the advantage of _privacy,_ for the first time since Shepard stormed back into his life. He’s painfully aware of EDI’s omnipresent presence throughout the ship, and even when they’ve gone ashore, it’s not like Shepard’s ever far away. And it’s not like he minds, it’s not like he wouldn’t go after her if she tried to give him his space or whatever, it’s just- Personal. _Private._

She doesn’t need this, on top of everything else.

He finishes the purchases around the middle of the afternoon, smiling a little wryly to himself at how easy it gets once they see the Cerberus tag on his credit line. Maybe in the rest of the galaxy, Cerberus is (justifiably) known as a speciesist terrorist organization, but here on Illium, judgement is a little different. All who can pay are welcome. Those who can pay the most are the most welcome, and Cerberus has deep pockets.

Afterward a quick lunch at a dockside vendor, he steels himself and finds a public extranet booth. He reinforces the shoddy security with his own - now he knows how all the brokers get their money’s worth, there’s at least twelve different monitoring programs on here - and sit there with his hand hovering over the call button for a full minute before he finally lets out a breath and pulls the trigger.

The connection beeps at him pleasantly for a few moments, long enough that he considers disconnecting the call and trying again tomorrow, or next time he’s in port, or maybe never- but then the line clicks open before he can go through with it.

“Garrus?” Solana says, her voice rough, a little scratchy with sleep. “That you?”

His throat goes tight at the sound of it, and he clutches convulsively at the side of his seat before he forces his hands to relax, folds them in his lap. “Yeah.” He clears his throat. “Yeah, Sol, it’s me.”

She yawns. “Do you know what time it is?”

“No idea." He scratches out a laugh. "It's, uh, it's somewhere in second shift here.”

“And where’s that, exactly?” Before he can think of a suitable lie, she continues, “Nevermind, don’t bother. Well, it’s the middle of the goddamn night, _here_. What the hell is wrong with you? Too good to look at your chrono?”

The irritation in her voice makes him smile a little in spite of himself. “Something like that. Listen, Sol, just wanted to check in. Make sure everything’s going okay.”

“Well, it’s not.”

His heart flutters. “Mom’s-”

“The same,” Solana cuts in. “No change.”

He scowls down at his hands. “I thought the new treatments-”

“No. Not yet, at least.”

“ _Damn_ it.”

“Yeah.” Silence from the other end of the line. “Have you talked to Dad?”

“Not…. recently,” he hedges. He has no idea how much Dad’s told her. Not much, knowing Dad. Besides, Garrus told him that he was fine- well, Shepard told him on his behalf, but Dad wouldn’t know that. He’d read the dismissal in the general alert and understand that they’d gone back to normal, and that’s…. fine. Probably. “Why?”

“He’s been quiet the last few weeks. Won’t tell me why.”

The tight feeling in his chest, Garrus tells himself, is probably nothing but the result of eating too many ration packets. He really needs to pick up some halfway decent supplies while they’re in port, for real this time. “Sure the gardener didn’t trim the hedges wrong again?”

“ _Garrus.”_

He shrugs, even though she can’t see it. “Dunno what you want me to say, Sol.”

“He normally only gets like this when it’s about you.”

He closes his eyes. Prays to the household spirits for forgiveness, and says, “It’s not like he doesn’t have anything else on his mind.”

She lets out a breath, a quiet sound in his ear that carries all of her exhaustion, her worry and her heartache. All of the things he should be there to help her with, the burden that’s his duty as eldest to carry. “Yeah.”

_I’m sorry, Sol. I’m so fucking sorry._ “Do you need money?”

“We’re fine.”

Which isn’t the same thing as _no,_ he knows. Before he left the Citadel last year he set up his Council stipend to pay into Solana’s account automatically, but with him off active duty it’s not much. He’s got a decent number of credits stashed away in an emergency fund on Omega, but he shouldn’t go back there until the heat dies down a little and it’d only be enough to pay for a single session, anyway. He needs a cash flow, a _real_ income source if he’s going to help out.

He shies away from the thought of asking Shepard. If he told her he needed money she’d give it to him, without hesitation, but she’d also ask _why_ , and since privacy is one of those pesky moral values that are for other people she wouldn’t let up until she had her answer, and that- He doesn’t need her to know that. Bad enough for her to come along on one of the worst days of his life, to see him so low and so desperate and so broken, without her knowing the rest. She doesn’t need to take on his problems along with everything else. She’s got more than enough of her own.

“I’ll see what I can do,” he tells Solana. He'll think of something, he always does. Shepard's not the only one who's got ways of finding credits when she needs them most. “I’m on kind of a… complicated job at the moment, but I’ll get something together. I promise.”

“Yeah,” Solana says, and the worst part is, she doesn't even sound bitter. Just tired. “I’ve heard it before.”

“Sol…”

“It’s fine, Garrus. Do what you’ve got to.” Unspoken: _and I’ll do what you should be doing._ “You call for anything else?”

_Just to hear your voice._ “No. Just wanted to check in while I’m in comms range.”

“Yeah, well.” A moment of silence. “Next time find something with a working visual connector. And try not to call in the middle of the night.”

He looks at the blinking _audio only_ light above the screen. He thought about trying to connect to hers, claiming malfunction on his end, but his sister isn’t stupid. And she’s already starting to wonder. “I’ll do my best,” he says. “Get some rest, little sis. I’ll talk to you when I can.”

“Yeah, yeah.” She yawns. “Good luck out there.”

“Night, Sol.”

“Night.”

She clicks off the line, and he sits there for a moment, head in his hands, chest aching. And then, very slowly, he straightens up, shakes his head to clear it, and steps out of the booth, nodding politely to the stocky asari woman waiting in line behind him. Her gaze wanders across his face, down to the bandage and over the ruined line of his jaw, then snaps away. She frowns to herself, very faintly, and brushes past him into the booth.

He grimaces, mandibles tight against his jaw, his hands clenching into useless fists at his sides. When he comm chimes, Shepard's face in his HUD, he almost doesn't answer.

_It's not her fault, Vakarian,_ he tells himself. And then, _at least Shepard's never flinched._

He keys open the line.

"Yeah," he says, shortly.

"Finish up whatever you're working on," Shepard says, either not noticing or not caring about his less-than-friendly greeting. "I've got a line on Krios, but we have to move tonight."

He looks down at his hands, then slowly, deliberately, forces them to unclench. "I'll meet you back at the _Normandy_ in ten," he tells her. "You need me to pick up anything on the way?"

"Just your smiling face, handsome," Shepard says cheerfully, and hangs up.

_Handsome._ He barks a laugh, earning a nervous look from the volus proprietor, and scrubs a hand over his good jaw. "I always knew she was crazy," he mutters to himself, and heads out the door before the volus can throw him out.

Apparently, he's got work to do.


End file.
